Monday is Martin Luther King's birthday. This is wonderful except for one thing. His kids are making money off it.
This has nothing to do with civil rights of anyone and everything to do with copyright law. More below the fold.
World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD)is a free, all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials. WFUD will take place at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on Tuesday January 12, 2010, and will be organized by Public Knowledge (PK), a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, consumer-advocacy group. PK works to ensure that communications and intellectual property policies encourage creativity, further free expression and discourse and provide universal access to knowledge. As part of its campaign to return balance to copyright law, PK hopes to use WFUD to educate the public about the importance of fair use in an information society.
WFUD will be widely attended and will provide attendees with a unique opportunity to network with policymakers, artists, academics, business innovators, media professionals, press, and consumer advocates.
Martin Luther King, Jr was a great man. Let's get that out of the way first. He has a federal holiday honoring him, which is fine. Have you ever wondered why there hasn't been a biopic...well, there was.
KING: A FILMED RECORD; MONTGOMERY TO MEMPHIS was originally screened for one night only in 1970 in more than 600 theaters across the United States. This tribute to the late Dr.King. while both a huge artistic and financial success, has essentially been out of public circulation since then. The reason is because it violated copyright, and the King family had it suppressed as soon as they heard about it. There have been a few others over the years, but unlike the Kennedys, the Kings have been very careful ot make sure most of what the great man did is unavailable to historians without getting paid.
The question of the "fair use" exception in the copyright law is a contentious one. the Sonny Bono law has hurt the arts tremendously over the years, and it and it's cousin over in Europe has produced a great deal of litigation most recently over the Tintin property, when the widow of the cartoonist and her current husband have been suing pretty much everyone who even mentions the character, who is a major part of pop culture over there.
Shepard Fairey's famous "HOPE" poster and the bruhaha over using copyrighted material as reference is a good example of what the problem is about.
On the one hand, it's difficult to create non-abstract art without reference, and on the other the creators of the original material have a right to make a profit of of their works. On the third hand, there are some images and people who are so important to the culture of country or the world that copyright has to be bent somewhat. Like Tintin and MLK.
As a judge allegedly said in the case of Berlin v. E.C. Publications, "I don't think I have to pay you a nickel every time I sing in the shower."