The music sharing advocacy site, Downhill Battle, has taken up the cause of reclaiming a piece of Civil Rights history. (In fact, it's "claiming" it in the first place.)

http://www.downhillbattle.org/

Eyes on the Screen is advocating the following:

* Copy Eyes on the Prize via the Internet, using Bittorrent.

* Burn copies of this important documentary for friends.

* Arrange a screening of the documentary on February 8.

Several clips used in EOTP are held by companies that are demanding high fees for their re-use. EOTP is the primary documentary about the historic Civil Rights movement.

Downhill Battle is an advocacy group seeking to push back the tide of propertizing intellectual work. It's an Internet-based social movement, arising from the inherent conflict between a medium (computers and internet) that produces perfect digital copies cheaply, and a society and economic system (capitalism) that tends to turn everything (and everyone) into transferrable property, and turn ideas and cultural knowledge into intellectual property.

The urge to download the latest MP3 songs and MP4 movies is about more than our addiction to consuming sounds and images. It's about sating that urge, and then moving on to the real conflict between propertized culture and a public culture.

It's vital that this new culture of digital sharing be supported, and reconnected to things that are real: inequality and exploitation, poverty and caste -- and using digital technologies to create resistance to them.

This protest is an opportunity, another intersection between the two cultures of digital freedom and the battle of culture against rampant neoliberalism and the "ownership society".

This is the meme of the moment.

If we don't seize the time, the act of copying data can be reduced to the work-like chore of being entertained by mass media. Digital piracy will be reduced to just another weapon in big media's marketing arsenal, a place to 'seed' their latest corporate contagion, to develop buzz for another bit of entertainment.

Duplicate for freedom.