Robin Shannon wrote:
G'day y'all,
The current ACOTW (Aussie colaboration of the week) is victor chang.
Now victor chang was murdered and because he was famous (in Australia)
had a public funeral, at which his daugter made a funeral speech which
was reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald. Now this all happened in
1991, which makes it impossible to link to the SMH article containing
the speech (because only paying subscribers can view the archives), so
i would like to put a link in the wikipedia article on victor to a
copy of the speech on wikisource. But i dont know if public speeches
are pd, or if US or AU copyright law applies. Does anyone know the
answer, or know someone who might know?
Most public speeches are copyright. I believe that US courts have
decided that there is a subsisting copyright in Martin Luther King's "I
have a dream" speech. In the absence of an agreement to the contrary
the daughter rather than the newspaper would own the copyright.
For determining whether something IS copyright the law where the author
had the closest connection would apply, but the courts where the
infringement took place would have jurisdiction.
Ec