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Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

Requiring originality is far too restrictive. For example: would only Martin Luther King be allowed to express his opinion, and absolutely no-one else? No, that hardly sounds like freedom.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, makes no mention of originality:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Intellectual monopoly seems inevitably basically in conflict with that. It is only possibly justifiable as a pragmatic exception.

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> would only Martin Luther King be allowed to express his opinion

If you want to recreate his entire speech (or mostly his speech), you would indeed need to get his permission. Or that of his estate.

If King wished to give his speech away, it was entirely his right and prerogative to do so. For the instances that I am aware of, he did not. In fact, King published and sold many of his speeches via vinyl record.

You are allowed to have your own opinions and talk about them. Pretending that seeding The Avengers is you expressing your opinion doesn't really fool anyone.

If King wished to give his speech away

I'm a little young to remember, but wouldn't most of the civil rights rallies been "open to the public"? Even if King gave away his opinions as a sermon to his church, I'd bet that attendance was open to anyone who cared to go.

Isn't public oratory (a.k.a. "speeches") the most flagrant manner of "giving his speech away"?

Shouldn't the question be reversed: if King wanted to sell his opinions, shouldn't he have avoided public oratory in which he gave away those opinions without getting an NDA or some other kind of license agreement with the attendees?

> Isn't public oratory (a.k.a. "speeches") the most flagrant manner of "giving his speech away"?

Are Paul Simon's songs in the public domain because he did a concert in Central Park? (No.)

"I Have a Dream" is definitely owned by King's estate. King actively registered the copyright on it. This wasn't an accident. There is no doubt he wanted to keep on owning it.

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