Open Source History, Or Why Sharing Trumps Proprietary Society

Is history open source? Not always, it seems, as Jonathan Band recently pointed out in an essay about copyright and legal issues surrounding the reproduction of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches for the film “Selma,” which parallels the key debates about open vs. closed software.

Writing on Techdirt, Band observed that the producers of the film did not obtain the rights to King’s original Civil Rights-era speeches. Consequently, the speeches King is portrayed as giving in the movie are not those he actually delivered in the 1960s.

Band provides a pretty thorough accounting of the legal and historical context surrounding this issue, which is not without precedent. And he also notes that the producers did not even try to secure the rights to King’s speeches, so it’s not completely certain that they could not have reproduced the words accurately in the movie if they had attempted to work their way through the hoops—although it’s unlikely they would have succeeded had they done so.

Still, without delving too much into the legal dynamics of this situation, it’s a reminder of just how deeply the divide between open and closed culture permeates not only the IT channel, but society more broadly. The owners of the rights to King’s speeches have economic and political incentives for restricting their use, just as software developers have a lot to gain, in financial as well as other terms, from closing their code and/or making it difficult for third parties to integrate with their products. And a strong set of legal precepts work in both groups’ favors.

On the other hand, it strikes me, and presumably many other advocates of open development as well, as deeply wrong that a single party should enjoy sole control over something as public and significant as the words that a key figure in 20th century history delivered before crowds of hundreds of thousands of people. Moreover, since (as longtime readers of my drivel know) I’m a professional historian by day, I find it dangerous that anyone should have a monopoly over the tools—in this case, the primary source texts of King’s speeches—that are vital for representing and interpreting the past accurately.

That type of monopoly is just as harmful to society as, for example, proprietary software platforms that are used to store millions of public records with no assurance that they will continue to work indefinitely (yes, Microsoft Office, I’m looking at you), or (to target another pet peeve of mine) wireless routers that drastically restrict what users can do with the hardware they have purchased (while also, in some cases, using your personal router as a public hotspot to make more money).

The open-vs.-closed struggle extends well beyond the realm of software. Until artificial barriers to reasonable sharing are obliterated, the interests of society at large will remain restricted, and innovation stunted.