Lawyers who won Happy Birthday copyright case sue over “We Shall Overcome”

Civil rights anthem never should have been copyrighted, plaintiffs say.

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[PRMan]

jonah[/url]":izevi6cx]The defendants are going to be kicking themselves when they realize that if they'd just approved the use of the song in the documentary then their gravy train wouldn't have come to an end.

This kind of situation is exactly why we need short, rational copyright terms. Once something is 30+ years old, it should be in the public domain. Full stop. The initial laws reflected this, with 28-year copyright terms.

I have no issues copying anything beyond 28 years old. Anything beyond that is my stolen property and rightfully belongs to me.

 

[PRMan]

fuzzyfuzzyfungus[/url]":2ru9l7ni]

Coriolanus[/url]":2ru9l7ni]You know what's also egregious? The "I Have a Dream" speech and other speeches by MLK, Jr. are still under copyright (obtained by MLK himself and owned by the estate).

Aside from the nasty bit of slogging over whether the speech was a 'performance' or a 'general publication'(which, in 1963, would have left it in the public domain unless explicitly registered when published) is there anything terribly sordid about the King materials?


There are some questions about whether the beneficiaries of the King estate are actually as interested in using it to advance civil-rights causes as they claim; rather than succumbing to the classic 'charity cancer' where an allegedly noble organization gradually ends up doing less and paying its 'leadership' more; but that isn't a copyright problem: an author's heirs don't have any specific obligations(barring something baked into the will) to dedicate their inheritance to anything in particular, so even pure self enrichment would be in line with anyone else whose daddy wrote something popular in the 60s.

I'm skeptical of the public-interest benefits of providing his work with 95 years of copyright protection; but that's exactly what any other author of the time and circumstance would get, so it's a quibble with copyright terms in general, not that specific author or work.

This case, like the happy birthday one, is a lot sleazier because the copyright itself is effectively a fraud; so all the proceeds are dirty, no matter how allocated. You don't have to like King's heirs; but the claim that he is the author of a creative work is pretty open-and-shut; with the only real dispute being the technicalities of what, if any, registration was required to satisfy the law then in effect(irrelevant now, since the Berne convention has largely eliminated copyright formalities except as modestly advantageous additional protections under certain circumstances, with fixation being automatic).

Copyright was invented to give us MORE creativity, not let MLK Jr's heirs sit around on their fat, lazy butts and do nothing with their lives.

That, combined with the fact that it's about all about freedom, makes it particularly egregious.