The link here is to a webpage at Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The page offers resources for learning about the limitations on the publication and republication of information materials. The image above is from a short move titled Disappearing History in which an expert explains why materials documenting the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. are no longer available for public viewing.
As the 21st century matures into a new era of open information, can images of history really be vaulted away? An allied question is much larger: why is what students use to study in school essentially all expensive and a clone or two removed from the original source? That is: why would an incident like the greeting above by President Johnson to Martin Luther King, Jr. not be viewable on a student’s laptop, but instead be abstractly reported in print in an expensive textbook watered down to the student’s school grade? Weighing free use of originals against supporting a very profitable school publishing industry is not only a matter of economics. It is also about learning quality and basic freedom of information.
