Teaching IP: Copyright, Civil Rights, Cultural Heritage
When we teach intellectual property (and particularly copyright complements) in the Comp or Tech Comm classroom, it’s very easy to burble on about distributing knowledge and preservation of cultural heritage and open access/source/content and then play a couple of mash-ups and be done with it. I know, because I’ve done it. And I wonder, how much difference does this make to our students, really? Can they make a connection between the creativity on the screen and the real-world work they’re most likely going to set about doing the rest of their lives? Probably not.
I’m still going to use mash-ups for dramatic effect, but there’s going to be way less of them in the future, and a lot more concrete scientific, technical, and cultural examples.
I’ve used King v CBS before, but only in passing. My IP-minded readers will already be familiar with it because it’s become one of the textbook examples of general publication arguments. (William Patry has a nice, brief commentary on it here.) The King Estate’s copyright on and demands for extensive renumeration for use of the “I Have a Dream” speech has prevented civil rights documentaries from being made and kept permissions from being renewed on classic civil rights documentaries like Eyes on the Prize. The documentary’s producer currently has a $65,000 grant to assist with the renewal process. $500,000 is the amount that’s actually required. (The King permission isn’t the only one that has to be cleared, of course.) This is your cultural heritage being surpressed by copyright.
And those limited facts make a pretty good example. But there’s more, as evidenced in this month’s Vanity Fair. (I always claim my subscription constitutes research, and nobody ever believes me.) The edition features an extensive interview with Clarence Jones, King’s legal counsel from 1960 to 1968. And in it, he details the collaborative process of writing “I Have a Dream” and his pride in having taken measures to copyright it.
When King headed to Atlanta just days before the march, Jones and Levison stayed in New York to craft the speech. They titled it “Normalcy — Never Again.” After three drafts, they got a copy to King, who made crucial substantive changes. Then, on the evening before the event, they all rendezvoused at the Willard Hotel, in Washington, D.C. King, in essence, held court in the lobby and listened to all of his key advisers’ suggestions. “Martin kept saying, ‘Clarence, are you taking notes?’ ” Jones recalls. “And I said, ‘Yes.’ We both kinda rolled our eyes at each other. The other leaders were determined to tell Martin what to say and how to say it.”
After listening for 90 minutes to the recommendations of Walter Fauntroy, Bayard Rustin, and Ralph Abernathy, among others, Jones took the draft to a quiet corner and incorporated various ideas into the text. “I brought it back,” Jones continues. “When I started reading it aloud, everybody started jumping on me, and Martin said, ‘Hush. Let ’im finish.’ I had tried to incorporate not only what this group had recommended but also what Stanley and I had written in Riverdale.” A bout of bickering ensued, and King wisely excused himself. “All right, gentlemen,” Jones recalls him saying. “I thank you very much. Now I am going to go upstairs and counsel with the Lord. Clarence and I are going to finish this speech.”
“I visited Martin in his hotel suite that evening,” Andrew Young remembers. “Martin was working away, editing the speech text, desperate to find the exact right word for every sentence. Clarence was coming and going, giving Martin encouragement and ideas.” Exhausted, they all went to bed, leaving Dora McDonald to type up a clean copy in the wee hours. By five a.m., King’s speech had been mimeographed and was being passed out to the press. When informed two hours later of the document’s dissemination, Jones put an immediate halt to it. “I called Martin in his room and says, ‘You know, this could be a major speech, and I’m concerned that you are protective of the ownership of this. So we’ve got to be sure it’s not published. … Don’t give up the copyright.’ Little did I anticipate that my act of moderate wisdom would be deemed as the most prescient service I rendered for King.”
Jones roots around his office and eventually produces the original 1963 copyright applications for the “I Have a Dream” address. Jones had ensured that the speech would not become part of the public domain but would instead belong to King and, eventually, his heirs. “Whenever oral recordings or republications of the speech are sold without permission from the King Estate,” Jones boasts, “a lawsuit occurs.”
Brinkley, Douglas, “The Man Who Kept King’s Secrets” Vanity Fair, April 2006, 168.
Untold collaborators, public delivery of a speech by a tax-exempt preacher as a public service to galvanize a civil movement, privatization, and the consequent suppression of a cultural heritage that belongs to the very people that speech was delivered to and for. Martin Luther King was an astounding man who led significant change in the country, but he was not an intellectual property hero. This constitutes a more obviously relevant example for students than another round of Danger Mouse and Negativland.