tea-and-charcoal:

silver-tongues-blog:

afraidofamericans:

jewish-psyop:

thecurvature:

tilthat:

TIL the reason the film Selma didn’t use MLK’s actual speeches is because Steven Spielberg has the sole film rights to all of MLK’s speeches in 2009. Ava DuVernay wrote speeches that were plausible, but different enough to avoid a copyright battle.

via reddit.com

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

It’s okay. Disney will stop anything made post-1928 from becoming public domain ever. 

Mickey mouse becomes public domain in 5 years so that means theres going to be a lot of lobbying in regards to copyright laws in the near future