If you want to buy a copy of Eyes on the Prize, a classic civil rights documentary, you may have to cough up $1,500 on eBay. The reason? Corporate and private greed, including the latter kind from the estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. The filmmakers can’t afford the rights gouges–and not just Hollywood’s. The King estate, for example, turned down even a $100,000 offer for use of the civil rights leader’s image. So Eyes is no longer in official circulation.
An argument from Bert Sugayan, now vice president to rights services for Getty Images, won’t wash. He says that society isn’t spending enough on documentaries. That might be true, but greedy studios, commercial archives and estates are no small part of the problem. This is, of course, yet one more reason for killing or at least mitigating the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a threat to the First Amendment. Artists, writers and others should be paid fairly, but, please, let’s have more balance. Changes in laws affecting VIP images could also go a long way. If documentary makers need to rely increasingly on massive funding from big corporations and megafoundations, then freedom of expression can only suffer. Getty and the King Estate don’t care–they just want to max their revenue.
Detail: When I looked on eBay just now for Eye on the Prize, I couldn’t find a copy at any price. The Ku Klux Klan ought to award a prize to Intellectual Properties Management, Atlanta, controller of King-related rights. I respect the memory of Dr. King and believe that the rapacity of certain of his descendants, and their lawyers, would horrify him.
(A Struggle for Rights from the Washington Post, via Free Culture Blog: Voice of the student movement for free culture. Also see an earlier article, Bleary Days for Eyes on the Prize in Wired News.)
