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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[KGFish]

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Coriolanus[/url]":2wxrq3qc]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.

I think that's the point - at least for me. This is a perfect example of copyright actually having a demonstrable and significant negative impact. It prevents history from being taught with all its impact, while it allows a bunch of in-fighting brats to not do anything useful with their lives. For anyone thinking about "it's an inheritance, just like any other!". No. No, it isn't. This is a government-enforced stipend.

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).

Agreed on the fact that this lawsuit is different from Lessig's crusade, and, to some extent, more necessary: it's about fraud, not whether copyright is where it needs to be.