Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Monday, Jan 16, 2012
Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech is considered one of the most recognizable collection of words in American history. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a national treasure or a national park. The National Park Service inscribed it on the Lincoln Memorial and the Library of Congress put it into its National Recording Registry. So we might hold it to be self evident that it can be spread freely.
Not exactly. Any unauthorized usage of the speech and a number of other speeches by King – including in PBS documentaries – is a violation of American law. You’d be hard pressed to find a good complete video version on the web, and it’s not even to be found in the new digital archive of the King Center’s website. If you want to watch the whole thing, legally, you’ll need to get the $20 DVD.
That’s
because the King estate, and, as of 2009, the British music
publishing conglomerate EMI Publishing, owns the
copyright of the speech and its recorded performance. While the
copyright restriction isn’t news, EMI’s unusual role in policing the
use of King’s words – the first instance of the company taking on
a non-music based intellectual property catalog – hasn’t been
widely reported. In November 2011,EMI Group
was auctioned off, and the publishing business was
sold to a consortium run by Sony Corp for $2.2 billion.
The awkward tussle over MLK’s words bears recounting, especially given the ongoing controversy over SOPA, which targets copyright infringements on the Internet – and highlights all sorts of problems with our aging copyright system and general ignorance about how ideas actually spread in the digital age:
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