We've covered how Martin Luther King Jr.'s heirs have a long and unfortunate history of being over-aggressive enforcers of the intellectual property of their father -- not for the good of society and civil rights, but rather for revenue maximization. At times it's reached ridiculous levels, and the latest is that the famed singer Harry Belafonte is now suing MLK's heirs after they've spent years blocking his attempt to sell (for charity) some documents that Belafonte received from King and King's wife. King's heirs argue that Belafonte got these documents through questionable means and they belong to the estate. The details suggest, yet again, that this is just yet another fight where the King heirs are so focused on ownership that they don't seem to care about anything else.
Mr. Belafonte, who often supported the King family financially during the civil rights struggle, said the dispute pains him. He said in his view, Dr. King’s children had drifted away from their father’s values. “The papers are symbolic,” he said. “It’s really about what happened to the children, and I feel that somewhere, in this one area, I really failed Martin.”
Of course, what isn't clearly delineated in the NYT article about all this is the difference between ownership of
the documents and the holding
the copyright on the contents. Late in the article, a lawyer claims it's about the copyright:
Clarence B. Jones, Dr. King’s lawyer and close friend, said the King family had every right to protect its copyright.
However, it doesn't seem like this fight has anything to do with copyright at all. After all, the copyright doesn't change hands with the letter (and the King estate almost certainly doesn't hold the copyright in the letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Mrs. King, which is included in the documents they're fighting over). Furthermore, even if Belafonte had the documents that included works that were potentially covered by copyright for King, the copyright would still remain with the King estate, but Belafonte could still sell the physical documents under the first sale doctrine.
That said, given how aggressive the King estate has been over copyright
as well as physical ownership of documents (they went after Boston University to get back a trove of documents King had directly donated to the school), it shows yet again how copyright is a tool that is used all too often for control, rather than for "the progress of science" as prescribed by the Constitution.
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