Less than a week passed after Jesse Jackson's speech at the Democratic National Convention before entrepreneurs began to profit from his stirring words. MPI Home Video of Oak Forest, Ill., bought film footage of the address from a subsidiary of ABC-TV and produced a 60-minute home video titled Jesse Jackson: We Can Dream Again. The $14.95 tape was an instant success, pulling in 31,000 mail and telephone orders from around the U.S.
But Jackson's lawyers moved quickly to push the stop button on the video venture. Claiming the speech was copyrighted, they sued in federal court, charging MPI with exploiting Jackson's...
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