Copyright: Creative Commons and CPSD

During Inaugural week, CNN announced that it was going to show Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in its entirety, which it claimed was big deal. This surprised me, but it turns out to be true. The King estate has been very aggressive in protecting a broad range of rights to the man and his work. The estate has, for example, sued newspapers (USA Today) for reprinting the speech without permission, and networks (CBS) for broadcasting it. In 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit found in Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. Inc. v. CBS, Inc. (194 F.3d 1211) that the speech was indeed subject to copyright.

Also part of the Inaugural week was an endless variety of merchandise, some of it about Obama, but some of it naturally linking him with MLK and The Dream. As expected, since the election the King estate has objected to unauthorized T-shirts depicting MLK and Obama together. As reported in The New York Times:

Isaac Newton Farris Jr., a nephew of Dr. King and president of the King Center in Atlanta, said the family was considering several options, including lawsuits against sellers of unauthorized merchandise linking Mr. Obama and Dr. King under slogans like “The Dream Is Reality.”

“It’s not about the money,” Mr. Farris said. “The law says that if you don’t assert and protect the right to an image, you can lose that right.” But he added, “We do feel that if somebody’s out there making a dollar, we should make a dime.”

This is just one more example of how copyright and related rights are occupying a growing part of our media and culture, in ways expected and unexpected. So here are just a couple of resources to help guide you through the more adventurous pathways of early 21st century copyright.

Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig

If the digital world is the informational Wild West, Lawrence Lessig may be the frontier marshal trying to bring a new kind of justice to it.

Lessig is a law professor at Stanford who for a number of years he has been writing and speaking about the importance of crafting a system of copyright that fits the times and encourages the creativity unleashed by all these digital possibilities. His most recent book is Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy:

Lessig is also the founder of Creative Commons, which describes itself this way:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

Center for the Study of the Public Domain

Center for the Study of the Public Domain is focused on intellectual property that is not protected by law. Or as CSPD puts it, “the other side of the picture”:

The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School is the first university center in the world devoted to the other side of the picture.  Founded in September of 2002, as part of the school’s wider intellectual property program, its mission is to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions.

Of the all the valuable cutting edge work that CSPD does, none is as fascinating as the comic book Bound by Law: Tales from the Public Domain. Yes, a comic book, but more than that, very likely the best comic book ever created to explain a complex, significant and dynamic issue of law (we need more of them!). Here’s how Brandt Goldstein describes it in the Wall Street Journal:

Bound By Law stars Akiko, a curvaceous, muscular filmmaker (think Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft with spiky hair) planning to shoot a documentary about a day in the life of New York City…[It] translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ – all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.

Bound by Law should not be missed by media creators or media consumers. The best part is that CSPD has made the comic available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution, allowing for appropriate use and distribution. (In fact, some members of the CSPD faculty played a major role in setting up Creative Commons.)