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If you weren’t alive to witness Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall 48 years ago this week, you might try to switch on the old YouTube and dial it up. But you won’t find it there or anywhere else; rights to its usage remain with King and his family.

Then, in 1999, a judge in Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. determined that the speech was a performance distributed to the news media and not the public, making it a “limited” as opposed to a “general” publication. That meant 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 1994 documentary, “The 20th Century with Mike Wallace.”

Typically, a speech broadcast to a large audience on radio and television (and considered instrumental in historic political changes and ranked as the most important speech in 20th century American history) would seem to be a prime candidate for the public domain. But the copyright dilemma began in December 1963, when King sued Mister Maestro, Inc., and Twentieth Century Fox Records Company to stop the unauthorized sale of records of the 17-minute oration.

The claim had been made before. In 1994, USA Today had paid the King estate $10,000 in attorney’s fees and court costs plus a $1,700 licensing fee after publishing the full speech without permission; the estate also sued the documentary producer Henry Hampton, alleging the unauthorized use of Dr. King’s image ...читать дальше.