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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

Schools have successfully used copyrighted books all the time in literature classes without problems. You can't run it off yourself on the mimeograph machine but just go buy 30 copies and leave them in the classroom.

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I was about to question whether or not you knew if this particular speech is actually available in its entirey anywhere that could be used as a source without potentially infringing copyright, but here it is available for download from the US National Archives:

http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf

Wouldn't distributing that file be considered copyright infringement? Just because you can legally access it there doesn't mean you have the right to redistribute. Sure you could direct your students there, but you can't do the copying yourself if I am not mistaken. Seems like picking up 20-30 copies off amazon would be easier.

The intended use in important. If a teacher distributes the speech in order to teach a lesson about it, it is very different than if a business man sell a book of the speech. Furthermore, the negative publicity from suing a teacher, using Martin Luther King Jr's speech to teach about civil rights should make any teacher completely safe from lawsuits.

Possible publicity is a pretty weak protection compared to actual legality, and I can't imagine a regular teacher (I'm excluding highly idealistic teachers, but those are few and far strewn) would risk their job illegally distributing those texts/videos, if there is even a quanta of possibility that that happens.

Teachers aren't the idealized constructs they often use to teach.

> Schools have successfully used copyrighted books all the time in literature classes without problems.

That is a completely different issue, classrooms have a specific exception (USC title 17 chapter 1 § 110 (1)) which allows "performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction".

The issue at hand here is that textbook publishers can't (or won't) include the speech or even major excerpts of it. And although a teacher can buy the speech DVD and play it, it's not a very good support to study the speech.

They have also been successfully sued a number of times for course packets, so they tend to be very careful.

So buy it. The same way they would study Shel Silverstein poems.

Of course they can. That's not the issue. The issue is that textbook publishers cannot (or will not) include the speech in their books, because then they would have to pay royalties (and indirectly pass along those costs to the schools).

Furthermore, use of the video is much more heavily controlled by the King estate.

because then they would have to pay royalties

The issue is the price not the payment per-se.

Schoolbooks are full of stuff that is copyrighted. The photos explicitly are.

We still have Norton's Antologies, right? Many of those are 100% filled with copyrighted works they need to pay royalties on. And they do. And everything works out just fine.

That's assuming you CAN buy the book/speech.

You can buy it in written form, audio form, or DVD form and you can license it for placement in a book.

Here is even an illustrated form for children with a CD: http://amzn.com/0375858873

> mimeograph machine

Showing your age? :)

In 2003-ish, while I was getting my BS, the professor passed out some of those funny-smelling purple sheets. I hadn't seen them since probably second grade (mid-1980's). Apparently both the copiers were broken, but there was still an old mimeograph sitting in the corner, she tried it, and it still worked.

Wow, I said mimeograph entirely as a joke, I didn't think anyone had used them this century.

So funny. I can instantly recall that smell to this day.

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