Tag: Martin Luther King

Fight for the Future Naive About King “Dream” Speech

FFTF Dream Screen Shot

I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the content of their character, but by the content they can steal.  

So, my friend David Lowery, on his blog The Trichordist, has been taking the organization Fight for the Future to task lately, and he most recently caught the organization in a lie related to DMCA  takedown and their defiant upload of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to YouTube. Back in 2013, to celebrate the  first anniversary of the defeat of SOPA, FFTF posted the “Dream” speech to YouTube in direct violation of the King estate’s copyright in the work; and the group told people to share the clip in what they called a “small act of civil disobedience.”  Small indeed. It’s bad enough to conflate the whinging, privileged, and corporate-backed “fight” against SOPA with the deadly labors of Dr. King, but there’s something even more insidiously galling about this whole MLK/copyright conflict that Fight for the Future and their ilk really don’t understand.  And maybe it’s because they grew up in a world of sound bites.

Since roughly five minutes after the Constitution was ratified, this country has been trying to live up to its own ideals, and getting there—and we’re not there—has taken decades and cost many brave people their lives.  In that speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King is demanding that America be true to its principles when he invokes the Declaration’s all men are created equal.  Those words are Jefferson’s preface to citing the natural rights of Man, which Jefferson cribbed from John Locke, whence comes the idea that the fruits of one’s labor are a civil right.  King’s enormous contribution is a part of that continuum—a history of struggle for the value of the individual voice to vote to speak to protest and to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor on equal footing with all other citizens.  And that last principle is why the intellectual property clause exists in the Constitution in the first place.

Yes, Dr. King is a big part of America’s struggle toward its best intentions, but it isn’t just a story about prejudice against race or sex or identity; it’s a story about the value of the individual and his or her right to pursue happiness.  Hence labor rights are invariably a central component of every civil rights battle ever fought—from literal slavery to the workers’ rights of the early 20th century to ongoing demands for equal work opportunities for women.  When Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis on April 4, 1968, he was there to protest the exploitation of city garbage workers.  Even the “Dream” speech itself was part of a march called “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”  The value of the individual’s labor is a cornerstone of civil rights; and what these featherweight activists at Fight for the Future completely fail to realize is that intellectual property rights are a significant expression—in fact the first legal expression in this country—of that fundamental principle.

Meanwhile, the free speech we enjoy—the free speech groups like FFTF believe is threatened by the King family’s copyrights—owes a great deal to the courage of King and his followers.  In the 1964 case of New York Times Co. v Sullivan, Alabama courts upheld a libel claim against the Times for publishing an ad called Heed Their Rising Voices in support of the King-led marches in the South.  The city commissioner of Montogomery L.B. Sullivan sued over the negative portrayal of his police department, and had the US Supreme Court not overturned key precedents in the lower court rulings, then the power of newspapers and public advocates to criticize elected officials and government agencies would likely have been diluted for many years to follow.  So, even with regard to free speech itself, all this digital-age dithering over a work that is widely and affordably available is a little pathetic in context to the history in which these people are dabbling.  (Coincidentally, I watched the “I Have a Dream Speech” last night, for the zillionth time in my life, as part of Episode 5 of the CNN-produced series The Sixties, now streaming on Netflix).

So, yeah, we can debate the practical application of copyright, discuss whether or not a particular work should remain protected and for how long.  But when a bunch of privileged, 21st-century kids (backed by very wealthy corporations, I might add) declare, from the comfort of their keyboards, that the emancipation of Dr. King’s speech from the “chains of copyright” is somehow a fight for civil rights, I propse that FFTF should change its acronym to STFU.  This is especially true when their idea of a “moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” means in this case to serve King up to corporate masters so his legacy can rightly become their property to monetize rather than his family’s.

My generation grew up with Dr. King’s words as part of our consciousness, miraculously without the aid of YouTube or the internet.  In fact, it’s noteworthy that the limited scope of access in the 1960s probably played a significant role in accelerating the progress of particularly the Voting Rights Act.  Because the first wave of Selma marchers had the unbelievable guts to walk unarmed into a mob of cops and goons brandishing knightsticks, pipes, and barbed-wire-wrapped clubs, and because the enitre nation was limited to just a few TV networks, it meant that tens of millions of citizens simultaneously watched—in a sense were forced to watch—the sight of innocent people being mauled. So, our new world of abundance isn’t always the potent, connective tissue we think it is.

Probably the most telling irony in this story is that by spending so much energy and corporate money fussing about the copyright on Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the folks at Fight for the Future demonstrate that they don’t really seem to understand the speech at all.  They demand access on principle but learn nothing about the work itself.  And if that isn’t the lie of the digital utopia writ large, I don’t know what is.

SOPA So what?

Silhouettes of tourists hiking on Bromo mountainDid you hear the echo?

This past weekend, as many people know (and even more people don’t), Saturday marked the two-year anniversary of the event known as SOPA Blackout Day.  In case you don’t remember it or missed it altogether, it was January 18, 2012 when various websites, most notably Wikipedia, went dark or semi-dark for the day in order to inspire users to take action and stop the SOPA and PIPA bills from passage in Congress. Google put out an online petition that a reported seven million people forwarded to Congress, and enough citizens called the Capitol that the phone system actually crashed.  In short, the protest worked.  It worked so well that members of congress got whiplash tying to figure out what happened to a pair of bills that had strong bi-partisan and White House support just days before.

It was remarkably easy to convince a lot of people that the proposed legislation was a threat to free speech and would break the internet as we know it, but I did wonder on the day whether or not the industry could keep banging the same drum indefinitely without getting on everybody’s nerves.  After all, one of the weaknesses of social media  is that it fosters flash trends and not so much sustained interest in any particular issue.  And, despite Google’s pre-anniversary email blasts and the EFF’s sponsoring a campaign called Copyright Week, I don’t think the message got very far outside the echo of the Valley.   It’s not surprising to see the industry attempting to use the same anti-speech refrain to rally public protest against the TPP trade negotiations, but I don’t think they can get lightning to strike twice.

A couple of posts ago, I essentially accused the Electronic Frontier Foundation of fear-mongering on this subject, saying that organization is acting more like a PR firm than a public advocate.  This yielded one response on Twitter from a member of the EFF, who sent this link to one of their many articles explaining what’s wrong with the TPP.  Read the piece for yourself without any preconceived bias — I personally don’t have strong pro or con attitudes about the TPP — and decide whether it’s being informative or manipulative.  Here’s my take on a couple of choice excerpts:

Lack of transparency:  The entire process has shut out multi-stakeholder participation and is shrouded in secrecy.

In my opinion, a public advocate would explain that the TPP, while unprecedented in scale and scope, is not particularly unprecedented in its relative level of secrecy.  With any trade deal, there is always a fine line between transparency and efficiency inasmuch as one cannot hold a real-time, public referendum on trade negotiations among a dozen nations and hope to actually get anything accomplished.  On the other hand, legitimate concerns have been raised about congressional oversight of ongoing negotiations, and these concerns are not to be dismissed.  Regardless, if the EFF is providing a public service, then disinterested analysis seems the proper approach rather than purple prose like “shrouded in secrecy.”  This is especially true given the fact that members of the EFF themselves have attended TPP stakeholder events, where, in fact, “multi-stakeholders” have been invited to speak and interact with negotiators.  If the EFF felt that these events were inadequate or unfair, then they are within their rights to share those observations with the public, but given their consistent use of conspiratorial language, it seems that their mission is not to inform but rather to elicit an emotional, SOPA-like response to the TPP.   Here’s another excerpt:

The TPP Will Rewrite Global Rules on Intellectual Property Enforcement

All signatory countries will be required to conform their domestic laws and policies to the provisions of the Agreement. In the US, this is likely to further entrench controversial aspects of US copyright law (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA]) and restrict the ability of Congress to engage in domestic law reform to meet the evolving IP needs of American citizens and the innovative technology sector.

This paragraph doesn’t actually provide any information to the average citizen.  I doubt anyone who doesn’t follow copyright issues consistently would even know what this paragraph means; but it sounds kinda bad, right? And since distrust of the government is at an all-time high, it’s relatively effective.  Why provide information, when you can use an atmosphere of distrust to pump out industry talking points like “copyright stifles innovation?”  What this paragraph actually conveys is we should not ratify a trade agreement that would reaffirm existing copyright law when we should in fact be reforming existing copyright law at home because we all know it’s broken. Of course, if you don’t think it’s broken — and polls indicate that most Americans still support the fundamentals of copyright — then this paragraph doesn’t say anything negative about the TPP at all.  What the statement is really doing, of course, is base-playing, rallying support among people who’ve already decided that copyright threatens speech and innovation, which means the EFF is campaigning, which is not the same as providing impartial advocacy.

For instance, what the EFF doesn’t tell you is how or why DMCA is controversial.  For creators, it is a nearly useless mechanism for requesting takedown of unauthorized use of their works; whereas to the EFF, DMCA is an insidious means for powerful interests to censor people through wrongful infringement claims.  Yet, if you actually look into the issue, you’d find that wrongful DMCA takedowns are fairly uncommon, often accidental, and are dwarfed substantially by the volume of unchecked infringement of protected works.  Just last week, Google alone reached the milestone of receiving its 100-millionth takedown request from the music industry, and Google will mostly get away with ignoring these requests because it’s very big and very rich.  So, is the DMCA controversial?  Hellz, yeah.  But the EFF isn’t necessarily going to tell you why.  Instead, it simply uses the word controversial to imply “not good” and then say that the TPP will “further entrench” what’s not good about it.  Sound vague?  Not by accident.

If you’re relatively neutral on copyright law, you might interpret that ratification of the TPP  could unreasonably expand copyright even in the U.S., and that would be false.  No treaty has yet changed domestic IP law, and even the portion of draft content leaked by Wikileaks reveals nothing inconsistent with existing domestic law. What the USTR would be seeking in this deal is to have signatory countries agree to establish and/or enforce their own IP laws that would essentially mirror laws we have in the U.S. This is neither sinister nor unusual, given that a lot of the trade we’re negotiating includes a lot of copyrighted property, like popular movies and TV shows. Moreover, it should be noted that, among countries that uphold copyright, the United States has the most liberal interpretation of fair use because we also believe in free expression, education, and social commentary.  So, the prospect of exporting our approach to copyright is not necessarily detrimental to individuals in foreign countries, although it would certainly be a pain in the butt for social media companies. Again, the EFF isn’t going to get bogged down in such gray areas because that’s not how one wins a campaign.

There are quite possibly some reasons to be concerned about the TPP, but even Timothy B. Lee, with whom I disagree on just about all things copyright, states in this article that the trade deal is being falsely hyped up as Internet censorship. Lee will say that the TPP “exports some of the worst aspects of copyright law,” but this is only true if you believe those aspects of copyright law are bad in the first place, which brings us back to the domestic debate.  And that debate is why I believe the EFF and similar organizations are expending so much energy on trying to kill the TPP — because its ratification makes domestic reform from their perspective more difficult.  If that’s the case, then again I argue the EFF isn’t providing the public service of demystifying some of these complex issues so much as they are rallying support for a very clear domestic agenda.  Among the problems with what they’re doing is that all the hype over copyright can direct attention away from what might be serious concerns related to this trade deal.

Today, of course, is a legitimate anniversary when we celebrate a man who sacrificed his life to exercise free speech more eloquently than most to address real threats to civil liberty.  People my age were in grade school just a few years after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I was at that time in a school populated by mostly African American kids. The mood was still visceral; the immediacy of King’s legacy was part of our development into conscious beings; and King can claim credit for the many voices that followed his example.  And still we have people in this country who would shoot Dr. King all over again; so we’re not quite done chasing his dream.  By contrast, I have to say the sound of ivory-tower lawyers ringing the bell of freedom from the tyranny of copyright is just a tad decadent.

Dr. King & the Public Domain

Every time a Martin Luther King anniversary comes around, the anti-copyright armada is well armed with blogs and articles decrying the indecency that the civil rights leader’s words and recordings are not in the public domain.  And never one to miss such an opportunity, even while missing the point, Mike Masnick at Techdirt insists that Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech should no longer be protected by copyright controlled by the King estate.

You know the speech, right?  Who doesn’t?  We celebrated it’s 50th anniversary yesterday, and it’s only one of the most famous pieces of oratory in world history.  Yet, despite the fact that Dr. King’s words managed to attain osmotic universality long before the invention of YouTube, one gets the idea from reading Masnick’s post that without “sharing” the speech through social media, it might simply vanish into oblivion.

I understand the sentiment.  After all, these words feel like public property, and they were among the many gifts King gave to humanity.  So, is it really fair that the King family can manage or even license this speech and “sully” its legacy with money?  It is.  And the primary reason should be obvious:  because YouTube doesn’t belong to the people, it belongs to Google; and Google monetizes every click. That means Masnick’s idealistic musings that sound humanistic are already sullied with money, except that in his world, the money would be Google’s, and the King family would get zip.  How is that more fair or better serving the public interest?

The internet industry has done such a thorough job of telling people that the web belongs to all of us, we actually believe it.  Masnick’s title “Let Freedom Ka-Ching” is admittedly clever, but it’s also hypocritical.  He mocks the tawdry commercialism of licensing King’s emancipating words for use as a ringtone and cites Professor Boyle of Duke University, who also mocks such use; but why is the alternative better?  If I made an homage mash-up that earned millions of views on YouTube, why would it be any less tawdry for Google to advertise fast food against it?  Go a step further:  what if a white-supremacist group creates a racist mash-up with the speech that generates millions of views, and Google sells ads against that? The King family would be powerless to do anything about it, and Google would keep the video online because it’s “free speech.”  Ka-ching!

We keep forgetting that copyright is often about preserving the integrity of works, and not just about money. Estates have long played the role of curators who protect the legacy of authors’ works, and we dismiss the value of this at our peril, even as we mock the idea of “I Have a Dream” as a ringtone. I happen to think a ringtone is not a bad use as uses go, but that’s another conversation.

The web moves fast, it favors what “trends” and not necessarily what endures.  There is no evidence to suggest that my fellow Americans are any more enlightened or have more ardently embraced the goals of the civil rights movement because of social media and so much jittery sharing of things.  Worse yet, can we say for certain that a generation or two from now, the legacy of King would not be mangled through reuse beyond all recognition?  The answer is no we can’t say that for certain because we’re making assumptions based on technologies and social trends that are less than a decade old.  And we have seen plenty of evidence that what goes viral is not always accurate or valuable.

I for one think Martin Luther King, Jr. already gave us plenty; and access to his works is anything but limited.  You might have to get off your butt and go to the library, but considering how far he walked, that doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.