Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc.
United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
194 F.3d 1211 (1999)
King delivered his famous 1963 speech with SCLC actively seeking extensive news and media coverage of the march, then filed for statutory copyright protection about a month later, and the estate (plaintiff) periodically renewed and licensed use of the speech, but CBS (defendant) used substantial archival footage of the speech in a 1994 documentary without licensing it, arguing the speech's earlier public delivery and extensive media coverage constituted a general publication extinguishing copyright protection; the district court granted CBS summary judgment.
Whether publication of a copyrighted work to news and media outlets, on its own, is a general publication such that common-law copyright protections are extinguished.