E-Mail This Article to a Friend DOCUMENTARY DREAMS Eyes on the files BY MIKE MILIARD

Chronicling the American civil-rights movement from 1952 to 1965, Henry Hampton’s 360-minute miniseries, Eyes on the Prize, is one of the most important documentary films ever made. Originally aired in six parts on PBS in 1987, it uses interviews and archival footage to tell the stories of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, Selma and Watts. But, significant as the film is, it’s long been out of print and hasn’t been broadcast for more than a decade. The problem is that the licensing agreements on the vast array of photographs, video clips, and musical numbers it relies on — including, for instance, a scene in which Martin Luther King is serenaded with the copyrighted "Happy Birthday" — have expired, and the film’s production company, Boston-based Blackside, doesn’t have the wherewithal to renew them.

In honor of Black History Month, Worcester copyright-reform activists Downhill Battle are calling attention to this injustice. And while they’ve had to rescind their initial act of online civil disobedience, they’re still spearheading an effort to inspire community screenings of the film in as many places as possible on Tuesday, February 8.

Like many twentysomethings, Downhill Battle co-director Tiffiniy Cheng first watched Eyes on the Prize in school. "We all were lucky enough to grow up in a time when it was available," she says. "When we saw that it was unavailable, we thought we should do what we could to make sure it could be again, and should have a day to celebrate the film." So Cheng and Downhill Battle principals Nicholas Reville, Holmes Wilson, and Nick Nassar did what they do best, employing the technological know-how and willingness to push their legal luck that have made them one of the more innovative activist groups in the country (see "Fight Songs," News and Features, October 22, 2004). They procured a copy of the film from the library and, with the help of a group called the Common Sense Releasers, digitized it into high-resolution, projector-ready MPEG-4 video technology. Then, using the "Blog Torrent" file-sharing technology they’d developed, they hosted the first three episodes for download on their site.

It wasn’t long before Blackside’s lawyers caught wind of this. When they asked Downhill Battle to remove the torrent links last Friday, they promptly did — but not before, by Cheng’s estimates, about 2000 people had downloaded the files. "We understand that [Blackside can’t allow themselves to be] implicated legally in what we’re doing, so it wasn’t too much of a shock," she says. "We’re trying to be as respectful as we can. We don’t want to wage any sort of battles with the copyright holders, especially because this is an important film and we need to focus on the film." To that end, says Cheng, everyone who has a copy of Eyes or can somehow get their hands on one should host a screening, large or small, on his or her own.

Henry Hampton died in 1998, and Blackside is now overseen by his two sisters. Last week, Wired.com reported that Sandy Forman, a lawyer for the company, is overseeing efforts to re-license the copyrighted footage, thus enabling Eyes to be rebroadcast and/or released on DVD, ideally by next year. It won’t be easy. Recently, Cheng says, "the Ford Foundation stepped in and created a research group around this, spending $65,000 to find out how much it would cost for Blackside to clear the rights. And they’ve come up with an estimate of $500,000." That’s partly because, as DVDs expand the movie market and copyright holders seek more compensation accordingly, licensing fees have increased. More than that, however, "the problem with this whole process is that every single work has to be cleared. You have to find out who the owners of these different copyrighted works are. And you need to negotiate with every single copyright licensee. And it becomes such a large process, and especially with a movie like Eyes On the Prize, with so much footage."

In Cheng’s view, it’s unconscionable that pecuniary concerns are preventing an educational tool like Eyes from being seen by more people. And, while it would be folly to compare Downhill Battle’s activism with the kind practiced by African-Americans in the ’50s and ’60s, she does note that "civil-rights leaders are stepping forward and saying that they really believe in what we are doing and that they can’t believe that Eyes on the Prize is unavailable, that it’s a huge public tragedy. We need to organize and make sure everyone understands that there’s a system in place, a corporate culture in place, that keeps people from learning about the civil-rights movement." (According to a Tuesday posting on the Downhill Battle site, a teacher who was planning a February 8 screening in Vienna, Virginia, was forced to cancel after lawyers for a licensee threatened a lawsuit.)

Eyes on the Prize will screen on Tuesday, February 8 at 6 p.m. at the Lucy Parsons Center, 549 Columbus Avenue, in Boston, and at 8 p.m. at Worcester Artists Group, 38 Harlow Street, in Worcester. For more information — or if you own a copy and would like to host your own screening — visit www.downhillbattle.org/eyes.