MLK's Most Famous Speech Still Clouded by Copyright Laws
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s why all the banks are closed and you’re off from work. But there’s an interesting little side note to the monumental figure that we’re honoring today and it has to do with, of all things, copyright law.
Have you ever listened to Dr. King's iconic and amazing "I Have a Dream" speech that he gave at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963? If so, we're sure you found it powerful, moving and transcendent. One more quick question: Did you pay to listen to it? Because if you didn't — thanks to some odd and dated copyright regulations — you broke the law. MLK's speech, perhaps the most popular of all time, costs $10 to enjoy.
King's estate controls every word that he uttered almost 50 years ago. If you want to download the speech you can contact them via their official site. This is the legal way to do it, and you better get used to it: The estate controls the rights until 2038. The problem with the historic speech is that it happened so long ago, way before the Internet, and much, much more. Thus it's protected as "intellectual property," which makes things difficult.
The issue has come up repeatedly over the years in clashes with various efforts to feature part or all of the speech in any sort of commercial work. It started when King himself copyrighted the speech and sued to prevent record companies from selling unauthorized recordings of it. After his death, the estate and family engaged in several legal battles to prevent a variety of media entities from using more than the legally allowed amount of the speech under the fair-use exception to copyright law without the family’s permission and/or payment. The estate sued the director of the 1987 civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, the USA Today Newspaper, and CBS. The King estate did, however, infamously sell the rights to the speech for use in a TV commercial in 2001.
But as digital media arose and the Internet became a more dominant media force, numerous copyright-violating versions of the speech were published online. And the estate, for the most part, didn’t seem to care. Either through the fact that no one online was trying to make money off of the speech or whoever was in charge didn’t really understand how copyright law applied to the Internet.
That all changed in 2009, when the King estate made a deal with British record company BMI Publishing, which had a lot of experience protecting its own intellectual property online, to handle the speech’s copyright administration. And ever since, BMI and the King estate have brought the fight to keep free versions of the speech off the web.
A variety of Internet and free speech activists had designated the Friday before MLK day “Internet Freedom Day” to honor the one-year anniversary of defeating SOPA. One group, Fight for the Future jumped on the event to highlight the speech’s copyrighted status and published a full video of the speech. They then promoted the fact that they were violating copyright law on Twitter and within 12 hours the video hosting service they’d used, Vimeo, had pulled the video down.
Of course, there are still plenty of presumably unauthorized versions of the speech floating around the web (see below), they just don’t proclaim their status like the Fight for the Future’s version.
Perhaps by 2038 we'll have this sorted out and MLK's words will be easily found everywhere without breaking the law. That might sound unrealistic — seeing as it's been almost 50 years now, and nothing has been solved — but well, we have a dream...
[Pic via Wikimedia Commons - Library of Congress]
