Art McGee on Mon, 14 Feb 2005 02:57:35 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> Putting Eyeballs on Copyright Law |
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,66550,00.html Wired News February 9, 2005 Putting Eyeballs on Copyright Law By Katie Dean BERKELEY, California -- Civil rights activists and copyright reformers convened for a screening of the first installment of the landmark documentary Eyes on the Prize Tuesday night to send the message that it is "morally wrong" to deny people access to information and history. Many of the 30 people (a handful of reporters among them) who crowded into attorney Don Jelinek's living room here worked in Mississippi and Alabama during the civil rights movement themselves -- registering black voters, staging sit-ins and marching, as well as getting harassed, shot at and jailed. These members of Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement meet monthly and decided to screen an illegal digital copy of the film when they learned that it was currently unavailable for broadcast or on DVD. As Wired News first reported, Eyes on the Prize, which debuted on PBS in 1987, can no longer be broadcast on television and has never been released on DVD due to a tangle of licensing issues. When the film was first made, each piece of newsreel footage, photograph and song used in the 14-part series had to be licensed from its copyright holder. Due to limited funding, the filmmakers could only afford to buy rights to the material for a certain number of years, and now those rights have expired. The unavailability of Eyes on the Prize prompted activist group Downhill Battle to organize screenings of the film across the country. About 100 screenings were planned for Tuesday in honor of Black History Month, according to the group. In Berkeley, Eyes on the Prize: Awakenings, covering 1954 to 1956, was screened on a large PC monitor to the rapt attention of everyone squeezed into the living room. The film covered significant events in the beginning of the civil rights movement like the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery bus boycott. "The events, images, narratives and songs of Eyes on the Prize were not written, created or performed by the corporations who now have the copyrights under their lock and key," said Bruce Hartford, reading from a statement signed by the 20-plus members of the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement group. "These folks are burying our history," said Jelinek, who spent three years in the South working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, spending some of that time ducking gunfire. "Copyright law was never meant to interfere with the public's right to know. We expected that the experiences would be in the public domain.... The people who are barring this will have to pay a price." Because only limited VHS copies of the series were available through libraries and schools, Downhill Battle directed people to download digital versions of the film (made by an anonymous group called Common Sense Releasers) using a peer-to-peer application -- that is, until a lawyer for Blackside (the production company that created the series) asked the group to remove links to the film from its website. The setback didn't stop the screenings. Many hosts checked tapes out of the libraries and Tom Hunt, one of the co-hosts for the showing in Berkeley, downloaded the first film in the series before Downhill Battle took down the links. Before the film, Hunt read a portion of Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives authors and inventors ownership rights for a limited time "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." Then he gave a brief overview of how the length of copyright ownership has been extended many times over, making it difficult for documentary filmmakers to "do history." Like people in the film, which highlights ordinary citizens who worked alongside leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. in the movement, former civil rights workers in attendance spent the evening sharing their stories. Wazir Peacock, whose father worked on a cotton plantation as a sharecropper, talked about how he gave up a career in medicine to work in the Mississippi Delta registering blacks to vote. Peacock said he got involved in the civil rights movement after being outraged that grown black men were still treated like little boys by racist southern whites. "It hurt me to my very soul," Peacock said. Jimmy Rogers became involved in the movement while he was a student at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). He described witnessing the murder of white seminarian Jonathan Daniels in Alabama. Daniels' murderer was acquitted. He also worked alongside Sam Young, another student at Tuskegee involved in the civil rights movement, who was murdered at a gas station. Blackside and other filmmakers who lent their talents to Eyes on the Prize are currently working to assess the costs of re-clearing rights. An estimate of such costs is expected within weeks. Blackside's attorney said the company wants to make the series available again. Hunt said he was very pleased with the turnout and the message that the screening sent. "It's showing how dysfunctional the current copyright system is," Hunt said. "It's in the way of the artists and their audience." Copyright (c) 2005, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net