King not as an author or copyright owner, but as an element within copyrighted works made by others. The authors of these works often have argued that their use of Dr. King is an original element, such that Dr. This argument rarely works. Perhaps the most interesting of these cases involved Dr. In Beal v. Paramount Pictures Corp. Beal argued that the works were substantially similar, in part because they both contained references to Dr.
King during a memorable barbershop scene , after Prince Akeem asks the barber Clarence for a jerry curl:. Clarence : Man, what you want to make your hair look like that for. Martin Luther King with no messy jerry curl on his head. You know, I met Dr. Martin Luther King once.
Clarence : Yeah, I met Dr. Martin Luther King in in Memphis, Tennessee. I was walking down the street minding my own business. Other cases have had similar outcomes. For example, in the more recent matter of McDonald v. The most recent MLK-related copyright litigation involves the song perennially associated with Dr.
King: We Shall Overcome. King reportedly first heard the song performed by Pete Seeger in , and subsequently incorporated it into his speeches. Unless the family decides to put it in the public domain beforehand, it will happen in , under copyright law. There is, however, a copy of it on YouTube, and it has more than , views. It was King himself who obtained the rights to his own speech a month after he gave it in Two companies had started selling unauthorized copies, and he sued them.
Since then, his family has received an income from exercising its intellectual property rights, and has gone to court to protect its copyright. However, those interested in borrowing from or otherwise using the speech have tended to drop their plans or have obtained a costly license from the King Estate or one of the affiliated entities—even when the users may had have a plausible right under the fair use doctrine to borrow from or use the speech without ob- taining a license.
The proposed analysis gives a suitably expansive scope to the fair use doctrine for cases dealing with uses of the speech or similarly historic works, given the important public purposes that could be served by many such uses. The Article also develops a test for use in determining whether a work is sufficiently historic, for purposes of the fair use analysis proposed here.
P rop. Thus, the speech, like other "performances" on CBS, was not in the public domain. That meant the King estate had the right to claim copyright and had standing to sue CBS, which had used a portion of the speech in a documentary, "The 20th Century with Mike Wallace. The claim had been made before. King's image and words in the landmark public television series Eyes on the Prize. While full copies of the "Dream" speech — and a number of other of his favorite speeches — have been removed from YouTube, it can still be broadcast with the proper licensing.
In , Alcatel aired an ad with an excerpt of "I Have a Dream," which it licensed from the King family for an undisclosed sum. Joseph Lowry, who worked with Dr. King himself donated proceeds from licensing the speech to fund the civil rights movement, and the King family has made similar pledges.
But while legal scholars might defend the family's legal right to King's legacy — and few would argue with the family's right to earn proceeds from that legacy — others focus on the larger, obvious point: whether or not King would have wanted his ideas used in advertising, he certainly wouldn't have wanted them to be kept out of documentaries about the history of the civil rights movement, for instance.
He attempted his entire life to communicate ideas for free. To communicate, not to sell," he says. The prophetic final speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop" was removed. An audio version is still available in parts on YouTube. In , EMI Publishing became the administrator of the King copyright, after a deal the music publishing giant struck with the King family for an undisclosed sum.
Given EMI's hefty experience in policing copyright material on the web — it courted YouTube's help early on , and recently won a million dollar suit over use of the Beatles catalog online — the deal was intended to better restrict the unlicensed distribution of King's words, and to license them, for instance, for use in pop songs.
The Gregory Brothers, who applied autotune to an unlicensed snippet of King's voice in a song they released in , have since removed the video from YouTube, though another copy still exists.
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