How copyright could be killing culture

[TankGirl]

Wired has a good report from the screenings of the 'Eyes'.

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.

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."