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Re: (un)published works and email re: Email Archive Request



On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 01:54:09AM -0400, James Miller wrote:
> Martin Luther King Jr.' s estate brought a successful claim of 
> infringment for his "I have a dream speech" on the basis that it was 
> "unpublished" within the meaning of hte statute.

I think you've got it wrong. According to Project Gutenberg, which
is publishing the speech and is usually pretty anal about these things:

> This speech has been through years of court cases to determine,
> in various jurisdictions, whether  it was ever copyrighted, and
> the United States court system recently laid down their rulings
> that this speech had never been copyrighted, since at that time
> it was required to post a copyright notice on printed copies to
> be distributed, and this speech was distributed without such an
> extra (C) Copyright notice as was then required in the US.  The
> US revised this law in 1989, an no longer requires such notice.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and 
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg



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