Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. by taking a look at how his estate may be lessening his legacy by exploiting copyrights that have extended into near perpetuity.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp32
This month the film Selma earned some critical praise and Oscar nominations, but it also earned hefty criticism for various inaccuracies and stretching of the truth. One of the more notable omissions from Selma are the actual speeches Martin Luther King gave during the civil rights movement. But that paraphrasing was intentional, and it's all thanks to copyright law.
Thanks to regular revisions to copyright law extending the term of copyright protection, the speeches written and delivered by Dr. King remain covered by copyright protection. In fact, the current copyright term is life of the author plus 70 years, which will enable Dr. King's heirs and estate to profit off his works until 2039. And this estate has been particularly litigious over the years, successfully suing companies like CBS and USA Today for using or printing full copies of famous MLK speeches. Which is ironic, since television and movie studios were the leaders of the recent charges to extend copyright protection terms.
That leads to an interesting conundrum when films like Selma come along, as the estate has already decided to exclusively license the rights to another studio Dreamworks for a future biopic made by Steven Spielberg. Thus, the filmmakers of Selma could not even approach the estate to include the actual speeches, and if they did, a significant copyright lawsuit and damages would have surely followed.
That seems to cheapen the legacy of this civil rights icon, as it makes things like the recent 50th anniversary of his speeches difficult to celebrate. Indeed, these speeches are such an important part of history that it seems inherently wrong that this genius cannot be shared with the world in textbooks and the like, for future innovators and great minds to build upon. All in the name of profit, such as when the estate received over $700,000 to authorize MLK's image to be used in the new MLK memorial in Washington DC. And that profit-grab just seems like a poor reason to effectively lock down and reduce the legacy of one of the true heroes of the 20th Century.
So remember cases like this when the copyright owner lobbyists begin to push for a further extension of the copyright term as expected in the next three years (like SOPA and PIPA, we should crowdsource strong opposition to stop such madness).
Bottom Line: "Life plus 70 years" has already arguably exceeded any reasonable economic incentive needed to encourage authors to make creative works and it provides too much constraint to help contemporary authors eventually build on the creative works of others, as is the case in patent law where terms last only 20 years. Scenarios like the profiteering estate of Martin Luther King Jr. help confirm the fact that copyright terms should be limited in the future, not extended, to reconfirm the balance and purposes of copyright law. But that's just one IP attorney's opinion.
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