What the actual fuck.
Just a heads up, this is sort of misleading. The rights are owned by the King family, they refused to license them to DuVernay because they’d already licensed them to Spielberg for an MLK biopic he’s been trying to make happen for the last decade. The speeches were copyrighted by MLK himself during his lifetime to stop unauthorized sale of his words, and since his death his family has kept extremely tight control on the rights. The only way to actually get a legal copy of any of his speeches is by buying a DVD through the King Center, the speeches don’t become public domain until 2038. Spielberg isn’t maliciously preventing black filmmakers from using MLK speeches, this is just another quirk of our dumb copyright laws.
Why are all these TILs from reddit always misleading or wrong. Like maybe we should stop using reddit for information
im scared for 2038 because you know capitalism will jump on the chance to use his speeches to advertise a new truck