It’s one of the most famous speeches in American history, one you never forget if you ever heard it. The problem is that it isn’t easy to hear the 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on Aug. 28, 1963, at the Washington Monument during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The speech is not in the public domain but is private property, owned by the King family, and anybody who wants to use it is supposed to pay for that right.
While some use of the speech or parts of it can be lawful without approval — individual teachers, for example, are not challenged when they use the speech in violation of the copyright — the makers of the 2014 film Selma were never given permission to use King’s words or life story because they couldn’t get a license, which had been sold to two companies for a movie about King’s life that Steven Spielberg is supposedly going to make.
Historians and civil-rights leaders have, over the years, expressed concern about limiting access to the speech. The King Center, which sells a DVD of the speech for $20 on its website, did not respond to phone calls and emails about the speech and licensing. The speech will enter the public domain in 2038 under copyright law, unless the family decides to release the rights before then.
There is, however, a copy of the speech on YouTube, and it has more than 700,000 views.
It was King himself who obtained the rights to his own speech a month after he gave it in 1963. Two companies had started selling unauthorized copies, and he sued them. Since then, his family has received an income from exercising its intellectual property rights, and has gone to court to protect its copyright.