The Unlicense Blog

Aditya Mukerjee writes:

Yesterday, August 28th, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream”.

If you live in the US, you’ve probably heard of this speech. You’ve also probably never read it, heard the audio, or seen the video in its entirety.

Unfortunately, the speech is under copyright, and will remain so until 2083. As a result, it is illegal to republish under most circumstances.

Except for the famous, titular line, textbooks in schools almost never publish “I Have A Dream”. Documentaries can only include small, five-second clips. Take a moment and ask the people sitting near you if they’ve ever heard the opening lines:

“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. ”

I’ll bet you they haven’t.

Your children, grandchildren, and perhaps great-grandchildren, will probably grow up without the opportunity of experiencing this moment in history. They will learn about it in grade school, based off of secondhand accounts from teachers who have never read the speech either. And so on.

Frustratingly, the copyright holders include the estate of the person who delivered the speech, but not even the estate of the two other people who wrote it (and likely wrote most of it).

Worse, “I Had A Dream” was delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. If it had been delivered in 2013, not 1963, there would have been hundreds of cell phone recordings of the speech all across the Internet within minutes. It was truly a public performance in every sense of the word.

The original purpose of copyright, as defined by the US constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

Emphasis mine.

Let’s ask ourselves: if Martin Luther King, Jr. had known that six generations of students would grow up without legal access to his speech at “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation”, would he have been more likely to deliver it…. or less?