"Eyes on the Screen"
Posted by Doug Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:40:00 GMT
Downhill Battle is a non-profit organization working to end the major label monopoly and build a better, fairer music industry. They are organizing an event called “Eyes on the Screen”, a nationwide campaign to distribute digital versions of Eyes on the Prize. Here’s the background. Eyes on the Prize is fairly unanimously called “the most important civil rights documentary ever made”. This documentary is unavailable and illegal to distribute because of copyright issues. The documentarians included footage covered under copyright. The rights holders refused to license the footage in perpetuity. The documentarians could only afford a five year license on the footage. That license expired 10 years ago and there’s no funds to relicense the material. Here is a Washington Post article that describes the situation. If ever there was a fair-use of the material, this is it. However, the ever extending copyright doesn’t see it that way.
The “Eyes on the Screen” event from Downhill Battle is an organized civil disobedience of the copyright law. Downhill Battle will make the video available for download through Blogtorrent. I’m participating in “Eyes on the Screen” for two reasons. First, I firmly believe that current copyright law in the US gives too many rights to the content owners (that’s not necessarily the content creators) without enough benefit to society as a whole. Second, I grew up in a mostly racist culture. The civil rights movement was mostly looked down on and made fun of. I think the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most important political efforts of the 20th century. This is a relatively new opinion for me. I’d like to watch Eyes on the Prize to learn more about this time in US history. Here’s a short excerpt from an article in Wired Magazine about “Eyes on the Screen”:Lawrence Guyot, former leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, plans to organize a screening in Washington, D.C. He said that Downhill Battle’s reaction is “precisely what is needed.” “If people had stuck to the law, black people wouldn’t have the right to use restaurants and hotels. If people had stuck to the law, women wouldn’t have the right to vote. If people had stuck to the law, women wouldn’t have the right to own property,” Guyot said. “Our country has a history of laws that we are very proud we have moved away from.” Guyot said that the series is important because it shows “the power of ordinary people to get civically engaged and make policy changes.” That’s a crucial message for young people, in particular, to hear, he said. “Now is the time to fight through the miasma of who owns Eyes on the Prize,” Guyot said.
