Kind of an interesting look at copyright from Philly Burbs.com.
They say The King family holds a copyright on the 1963 speech along with most of MLK’s papers, writings, and images.Publish or use these without permission and you likely will find yourself receiving correspondence from the family’s lawyers, which begins: “You have been sued in court.”
The article says The King family has said it’s protecting the image of the great civil rights leader from hucksters with crass gift shop proposals like refrigerator magnets, MLK ice cream and pocketknives, according to Slate, a Web magazine.
Yet, the family approved “Keep the Dream Alive” personal checks and a “tasteful” King statuette available from the King Center in Atlanta.
The author says the complete commodification of a modern prophet is cheesy.
even the stuff MLK plagiarized?
http://66.165.133.65/inboxer/outrage/mlking.asp
Can you copywright plagiarized material? Not that all of his material was plagiarized but enough to make this story more interesting than it first seems.
Re:even the stuff MLK plagiarized?
a better url to the same page
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/mlking.asp
But it’s not
Go read the page.
It talks at the top about allegations, then addresses them below. It says that the allegation that Mr. King ripped off Carey’s work is largely over-blown. They do mention some of the same things, same as a piece of music… but that’s not the same as, say, his dissertation, which he plagarized.
— Ender, Duke_of_URL
ÃŽ
Supression of fair use
As far as I’m concerned they can kiss my quotes files. In fact, I’ll even make it easy for them.
As far as I’m concerned, this, like the Disney-Dog-In-The-Manger, is all about money, not copyright protection.