This radio forum post claims you will rarely if ever see a broadcast of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech because the footage is copyrighted by the King family and they demand heavy fees for even short clips. Is this correct? How can you copyright footage you didn’t even take? And couldn’t you just use footage taken by other cameras?
While commercial use appears to require a fee like you mentioned from the King estate, there are several copies on this thing called YouTube that haven’t (as yet) been taken down.
Good Mother Jones article for further reading.
AIUI, King wrote his speech down and filed for copyright. Had he spoken extemporaneously at the rally, then it would be in the public domain. Since he wrote it down, it was copyrightable.
I don’t know if the footage is copyrighted. If not, it can be freely shown. But since the speech is copyrighted, the footage would have to be shown with out audio of the speech.
IANAL.
The key thing to keep in mind here is that the King’s copyright is limited — as are all copyrighted things — by “fair use”
And fair use also limits the extent to which something copyrighted can be used; no more content than neccessary, and rarely the entire work.
The King family does hold a copyright on the speech, and that copyright will last another 25 years. A news station might be able to broadcast a little of the speech under fair use, but a full broadcast would require a license.
Same reason you could not broadcast your own homemade video of a full-length production of, say, “The Odd Couple.” If you don’t own the rights to the work, you can’t broadcast it. Doesn’t matter who shot the footage.
Does the King family have any established reputation for how they manage their rights to the speech?
Do they license it for a nominal fee to rebroadcasters whom they consider supportive of civil rights? Do they charge an arm and a leg (or not allow it at all) for rebroadcasters whom they consider hostile to civil rights?
The King family is out for as much revenue as they can possibly generate from MLK’s likeness and work and they have a team of attorneys aggressively pursuing their interests in court.
Dr. King’s estate suing family of his former secretary
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/01/15/3790473/dr-kings-estate-suing-family-of.html#storylink=cpy
King children sue brother, father’s estate
I wonder how much the rights cost to play the speech on an episode of the “Cosby Show” cost.
I have a CD set - Great Speeches of the 20th Century ( http://www.sound-ideas.com/sound-effects/great-speeches-20th-century-sound-effects.html )- where the entire speech is one of the tracks. It is IIRC about 11 minutes long, so a 30-scond clip would probably qualify as fair use in the right context (depending on how good your lawyers are?). Wow, it was nowhere near $129 when I bought it about 1990.
It’s somehow refreshing to know that even children of a great man are money grubbing pigs, playing copyright hardball with documentarians but willing to get paid by Mercedes Benz or Cingular Wireless.
Some reasons:
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YouTube is MASSIVE. Even if literally every Google employee reviewed videos full time, they still wouldn’t even be able to review more than a trivial percentage of uploaded YouTube content.
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YouTube’s content match system fails to recognize content for a lot of reasons. Minor changes in image/audio quality can help a video go unrecognized. Some uploaders purposefully mirror (or otherwise alter) the video, or add an audio filter, to prevent YouTube’s content match from working.
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It’s within the King’s family rights to selectively remove content. They might allow some copies to remain on YouTube, and still sue anybody who would try to place the entire speed in a documentary movie. It’s not like trademark law where you have to be diligent to catch every single violation or it weakens future cases; with copyright you can be selective and issue DMCA’s strategically.
Well, they’re clearly not aware of Amazon.com either!
YouTube relies heavily on computer scanning, not humans, for the first tier of analysis. Their scanners detect everything within minutes of a new posting; after that, not so much.
I think you underestimate the power of Google/YouTube’s analysis. I have found (and others have, too) that they can correctly detect a song performed in a different key, by a different performing group, at a different tempo, with a different instrumentation.
Which leads to many false positives, but I’m amazed at what they detect as evidenced by things they complain about in my YouTube postings.
However, I think they realize their system has weaknesses, so typically if they complain about something I post, they only make a “soft” complaint, and back off if challenged. Rarely do they remove anything I post without warning, and since I usually challenge it, they remove their complaint or just let the video go with no action (but they may add unwanted ads to it, and they tell you about that). I’m not sure any of my challenges ever reached the level of a human.
I also conclude that not all copyright holders pursue this method. YouTube won’t police anything that they aren’t notified about; that is, if you own the rights to something but don’t want to challenge anyone, YouTube doesn’t put your work in their scanning list and it is ignored. Different strokes and all that.
Isn’t that what I just posted?
I’m not going to get into a pedantic discussion as to how well YouTube’s content matching system works, because that’s not the point of the discussion.
I’m not sure why you posted this frankly. It seems like you agree with what I said.
For what it’s worth, it looked to me like he directly contradicted what you said— which seemed to imply that Google couldn’t keep up with copyright violations because they didn’t have enough manpower to do it manually, and their automatic scanning system can’t detect content that was purposefully altered.
**Musicat **said a) they don’t do it manually anyway and b) yes it can.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. 
Coincidentally, my assignment in class this week is to watch and discuss the I Have A Dream speech. The link provided by the teacher for the whole speech is on YouTube.