The author's argument appears to be that Dr. King's speech is too important to be protected by copyright. The author provides very little to support this position other than an appeal to emotion.
Lacking support with relevant facts, details, and rationales, the argument is, for me, entirely unpersuasive.
Although I am certainly not an expert on the history of Civil Rights in the 1960's, I was curious as to who Bill Rutherford was and what he did. Before I found much I came across the source from which the author lifted:
>“I think Martin Luther King must be spinning in his grave,” Bill Rutherford, who was executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when King was murdered, told 60 Minutes. “He gave his life for his ideas of justice, peace and love. He attempted his entire life to communicate ideas for free. To communicate, not to sell,” he says.
Nobody's disputing that it's important to the public and to history. The point of contention is whether that implies that it should be un-copyrightable. I'm with brudgers--nothing in this article gives any justification for that proposition.
I think you're both begging the implied question: why should this work be protected?
Regardless of the importance issue, we are discussing a speech given by one man nearly half a century ago to a huge audience in a public place. Today, that speech has somehow become the intellectual property of Sony.
As the relevant jurisdiction here is the US, we can ask directly what the Constitution has to say about this:
"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."
I fail to see how
1. the above situation promotes the progress of science or useful arts,
2. Sony is the author or inventor of this work, or
3. protection that lasts longer than the average human lifetime is limited in any meaningful way.
After three strikes, I think you're supposed to be out.
Why should this work be protected? Protection is the default for copyrightable works. The onus is on the author here to show why this situation is different from the normal one, different enough to justify changing the rules. As for your specific questions...
1. Speech writing is considered a useful art. Creative works of authorship generally are. If you want to argue that point in general, fine... but let's put it into a general context instead of just focusing on this one speech.
2. Sony is of course not the author. But MLK is, and he never put this speech in the public domain. He certainly could have if he wanted to, but he didn't. His rights passed to his estate. His estate isn't the author either, but it has the right to sell or license. None of this is controversial or unexpected.
> Why should this work be protected? Protection is the default for copyrightable works.
It is today. And copyright durations are long and based on the author's lifetime today.
But Martin Luther King made this speech in 1963, and in 1963 copyright worked differently. It had a much shorter initial period and could then be renewed once for a second term. "I Have A Dream" would have entered the public domain later this decade, even if MLK had survived to renew it.
So, to address the specific points:
> 1. Speech writing is considered a useful art. Creative works of authorship generally are.
Indeed, and they are rightly protected. But retrospectively extending that protection for the benefit of unrelated third parties long after MLK's death hardly promotes such arts. Clearly he did give the speech without the need of today's rewards, and clearly he isn't going to be motivated to speak again because of them.
And please notice that this argument is entirely general and does not rely in any way on the fame or cultural significance of this particular work.
> 2. Sony is of course not the author.
Indeed. And nothing in the Constitution says anything about protecting the rights of anyone but the Authors and Inventors.
You appeal to the rights of the estate and the ability to sell or licence copyrights, but these are modern legal inventions, just like effectively unlimited protection terms. They most certainly are controversial and unexpected, relative to both the Constitution's basis for copyright and the law that was in effect in 1963. To accept the premise that these legal games are necessarily in the interests of promoting arts and sciences and encouraging authors and inventors is to miss the entire point of this debate.
I agree with pretty much everything you just said, except that I'm not sure about the ability to sell and license copyrights being "modern legal inventions." I haven't done any research into this, so I'm just going off my gut feeling here... but IP isn't much use without the ability to grant licenses. A license is just saying "I agree not to sue you for doing X." My guess is that licensing has been around for a seriously long time.
The right to sell... perhaps not quite as well-established or self-evident as the right to license. But still, my guess would be that it's been around since long before MLK was born. But like I said, I haven't actually researched these questions.
Just to be clear, when talking about selling or licensing copyrights, I'm really talking about deals where someone other than the original artist has either permanent or temporary control of those rights.
I would agree that if you can't at least grant temporary rights to make copies for the purposes of accessing the work, copyright is of limited usefulness in the Internet age. (Of course, this in itself is a relatively modern concern as well. If you go back far enough, it really would have been the copyright holder who was physically making all the copies anyway, and no licensing at all would have been necessary).
I think a lot of the trouble with copyright in practice today comes down to precisely that disconnect between the original artist and the long-term copyright holder. If copyrights could not be transferred, only delegated for a relatively short period, then all the middleman industries that tend to take the lion's share of the profits today at the expense of both artist and public would necessarily become subservient to the artists again, which I think would fix a lot of problems. If you are only going to get your contract as a distributor/marketer/whatever renewed after six months if you've been getting good returns for the artist for a fair price, and the artist can take their best-selling book or platinum-selling album to another distributor next week if they aren't happy with the deal, then a lot of inequalities get balanced out.
Then again, the Internet will probably render most middleman distributors irrelevant soon anyway. The process has already started, it's just that for now it remains the preserve of the technically knowledgeable and the trailblazers. Hopefully, as self-publishing becomes more mainstream, the result will be a rise of a new class of companies who provide actually useful/valuable services to artists, such as editorial/design work for authors or effective promotion that generates measurable returns for musicians.
Moreover, if transfers of rights could only be temporary, then an estate could only benefit for a genuinely limited time from the work of a deceased artist, instead of several generations receiving income in return for doing nothing effectively in perpetuity. It would be enough that an artist who had invested hard work in creating something valuable that should support his or her family could know that their family really would be supported for a while in the event of their untimely death, which seems reasonably fair, but that would be it.
Licensing law has really only taken off in the 20th century I believe, but there's older stuff that's very related.
Courts have long been troubled by licensing/assignment issues. IP is a "chose in action", and it's something that's more general. The older issue is about assigning debts. Here's an old Ontario law based on a UK statute I believe that allows for a certain kind of assignment after 1897: http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_stat....
Lacking support with relevant facts, details, and rationales, the argument is, for me, entirely unpersuasive.
Although I am certainly not an expert on the history of Civil Rights in the 1960's, I was curious as to who Bill Rutherford was and what he did. Before I found much I came across the source from which the author lifted:
>“I think Martin Luther King must be spinning in his grave,” Bill Rutherford, who was executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when King was murdered, told 60 Minutes. “He gave his life for his ideas of justice, peace and love. He attempted his entire life to communicate ideas for free. To communicate, not to sell,” he says.
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-319500.html