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Copyright activist group Downhill Battle has a new campaign — “Eyes on the Screen”. The PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize, the most important and thorough documentary about the civil rights movement in the United States, can no longer be sold or exhibited because the filmmakers’ licenses to underlying documentary film clips (e.g. film of MLK’s marches and even the “I Have a Dream” speech) have expired.

Downhill Battle has obtained a copy of the series and is digitizing it and offering downloads via BitTorrent. They urge downloaders to organize screenings on February 8th.

Michael Madison has this excellent post about the copyright status of works (like the footage in Eyes or the Zapruder film) that have such importance to our society and its history that they must be available for common use. He proposes a number of analogs from other areas of law that could be ported to copyright law to solve this problem — “cultural adverse possession,” “cultural prescriptive easements,” and “cultural essential facilities.” My favorite, proposed in jest, is the establishment of an equitable “ironic symbolism” defense, so parties sued for making a point about civil liberties by violating the copyrights on civil rights footage could have the suit tossed out because poetic justice demands it.

I think another concept from property law can solve this problem: eminent domain. The government should simply buy the copyrights to works this important and dedicate them to the public domain. We already use public funds to buy physical objects of great historical importance and place them in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian. We should do the same for expressive works so important to our history that they must not remain under private control.