Downhill Battle, the anti-copyright crusaders behind Grey Tuesday, launched a new project this week to spread the civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize”. Here’s their sales pitch :

Eyes on the Prize is an award-winning documentary series that many consider a foundation of our collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the most vidid portrayal of the civil rights movement and for millions of people, it’s the foundation for understanding what happened. Makers of Eyes on the Prize brought together extensive historical footage from the period and featured ordinary people who helped change the course of history for the better. No other book or movie has comprehensively brought together this much footage or has become a more common reference on the civil rights movement.

So why has Eyes on the Prize been unavailable for the past 10 years? Copyright restrictions. For example, the film includes footage of a group of people singing “Happy Birthday” to Martin Luther King…Eyes on the Prize is made up of news footage, photographs, songs and lyrics from the Civil Rights Movement that are tangled up in a web of licensing restrictions. Many of these licenses had expired by 1995 and the film’s production company, Blackside, could not afford the exorbitant costs of renewing them. “Eyes on the Prize” has been unavailable to the public ever since.

Copyright law has expanded out of control, and its public mission is no longer being served. Copyright was originally designed to encourage creativity and innovation–much like patent law. But for the past 50 years multi-national corporations like Disney and the major record labels have aggressively lobbied Congress to expand and expand and expand the reach of copyright law. Instead of lasting 20 years and requiring registration (like patents do) copyright has become automatic and now corporate copyrights last 90 years.

The problem of course is that these self-appointed defenders of artistry didn’t bother asking the artists they’re hiding behind. As a result, the nephew of the film’s director is justifiably pissed off :

I am heartily in favor of everybody showing their copies of Eyes to as many people as they can. If you have a copy of Eyes that you bought or inherited, great; show it. But please, please, please don’t don’t encourage others to duplicate it and distribute it, and please (above all, as some motherless losers are doing on eBay) don’t sell it.

There are negotiations ongoing (on and off, but ongoing) to re-issue Eyes on the Prize in DVD format, ideally with additional materials for teaching. Funds are being solicited for this effort, and sponsors pitched. This would allow the production of additional materials and allow Eyes to be distributed to the public and libraries and schools once more, playable on modern equipment and archived on more durable media. Every time the ‘COPY EYES!’ website gets seen by one of the rights-holders we have to negotiate with, however, the chances of us ever getting this done diminishes. This brings me to my second point.

Eyes on the Prize is not about the copyright movement. It is not about intellectual property. It is about the Civil Rights movement, and the Black experience in America. Using it in this way, no matter how noble the intention, will serve to brand it fairly indelibly in the minds of the policymakers as the ’spearhead of the p2p movement’ and the ‘emblem of the anti-copyright movement.’ While I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, I am saying that that will absolutely detract from the teachings and message that Eyes was, in fact, created to get across - teachings of history and messages of racial tolerance and diversity - by irretrievably muddling in a contemporary, hot-button (and entirely unrelated to the original topic) fight.

Whatever the motives, the countercopyright crew are essentially hijacking someone else’s life’s work and appropriating its power and recognition for their own purposes. In the process, they are potentially diminishing and damaging its own effectiveness. It’s not their place to make the decision to throw the weight of Eyes behind this fight.

Finally, I would point something out. They invoke Henry Hampton’s name and legacy on their page, where they advocate downloading and illegally distributing his works. Henry Hampton may have made documentaries, but that doesn’t mean he worked for free. Blackside, Inc. was always a for-profit corporation, and Henry Hampton took home what profits his films were able to generate. So trying to invoke his name while you encourage everyone to trample on the rights granted his works strikes me as extremely hypocritical.

Since that post, Downhill Battle has taken down their download links with the message “we have taken down the torrent links to these videos at the request of lawyers for Blackside, Inc. This sucks!” You know what else sucks? Hiding behind the civil rights movement.

I agree that copyright laws are out of control, but many aspects of these protests seem phony. How many people would have rushed to participate in Grey Tuesday if it were Toby Keith re-appropriating the chorus of an Outkast song? Would people have been as sympathetic to the samplers if it were a unsigned indie band getting sampled in a commercial for a Humvee? That movement was obviously about defending “cool” music (Jay-Z and DJ Dangermouse) against “uncool” music (The Beatles). There was as much rich vs. poor, young vs. old acrimony in that fight, but nobody was willing to be upfront about it. Instead, a fairly complicated issue turned into another childish vendetta against “The Man”.

This time it’s even worse. Without bothering to inquire about the status of the film, Downhill Battle took it upon themselves to defend this fair maiden against an evil corporate dragon. I guess it never occurred to them that not everybody wants to be saved. Then again, the whole civil rights thing was secondary to their real goal of subverting copyright laws. Since they’re so keen on piggybacking their projects on unrelated (but wildly popular) issues, perhaps for their next trick they can spread bootleg videos of Schindler’s List. Somebody needs to spare this masterpiece from Speilberg’s concentration camp of copyright hell.