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As Jimmy Rogers, 67, sat through a screening of the landmark civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize Tuesday night in Berkeley, he was quick to point out the faces and names of the people he recognized from the time he spent in the south as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

Next to him on the floor, David Ozer, 9, sat with his mom Sumi, watching footage of Montgomery bus boycott for the first time. 

Both Rogers, who now lives in Oakland, and Ozer, who came from Moraga, had gathered at the Berkeley house of Don Jelinek, a lawyer and civil rights activist, to watch the 14-part film which has been out of circulation for 10 years because of dispute with copyright licensing. 

Along with some 35 other people, they huddled around Jelinek’s desktop PC to watch a pirated digital copy as a way to protest the copyright laws and demand access to what they say is one of the most authoritative accounts of the civil rights movement. 

“I think our story needs to be told and we should have access to it,” said Rogers, who registered voters in Alabama along side Stokely Carmichael. “We should have some control over our history.” 

According to a story that first appeared in Wired News, the film’s production company, Blackside, Inc., has been unable to re-release the film because its temporary lease on copyrighted newsreel footage, photographs and songs, expired. Blackside is trying to raise the money needed to re-license them, but it’s slow going because the cost is high. One estimate put it somewhere around $500,000.  

The illegal screening in Berkeley was one of around 100 around the country that were organized in part by Downhill Battle, a non-profit based in Massachusetts which says its main purpose is to promote “participatory culture.” They had the idea after reading the article in Wired and posted a digital copy of the documentary on their website available for download through a peer-to-peer sharing technique called BitTorrent. That’s how Tom Hunt, one of the organizers of the Berkeley screening, got the copy shown at Jelinek’s house. 

The screenings, described by organizers as acts of civil disobedience, were meant to coincide with Black History month. 

Downhill Battle eventually took the file off their website after being approached by a lawyer from Blackside, but that didn’t stop the screenings across the country, as well as some internationally. Other screenings used copies of the documentary on file at public libraries. 

“I think probably the issue of the 20th century was race. The issue of the 21st century is going to be access to information,” said Bruce Hartford, a former staff member of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a co-organizer of the Berkeley event. “Without access to information, democracy is a myth.” 

Both Hartford and Jelinek belong to an organization called Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. After hearing about the screenings, they passed a resolution during their monthly meeting in support of the events and decided to have their own. 

“To us, knowledge is a human right every bit as important as the right to vote and the right to be treated with courtesy and respect. Therefore, we do not believe that reading, or viewing, or listening is, or should ever become, a crime. Nor should access to information become a luxury sold only to the wealthy,” part of the statement reads. 

After the screening, Rogers spoke, recounting several of the more harrowing events he participated in, such as the picket he marched to protest a segregated restaurant in Alabama. Even though he and others were met by a gang of counter-protestors wielding weapons, Rogers continued to picket and was eventually arrested.  

“I still feel that what I did wasn’t that significant. Other people gave their lives, like Martin Luther King,” he said. 

Next to him, David sat bug-eyed. He was shocked by the footage he saw of the murder of Emmett Till and the stories he was hearing. 

“This will be a good discussion point,” to say the least, said his mom Sumi.