This article began Wired Magazine’s coverage of the state of Eyes on the Prize and details how the escalating cost of rights clearances have affected the film. The article explains the current situation: rights for Eyes on the Prize began to expire in the mid-1990s, and these expired clearances prevent the film from being distributed on DVD. This already difficult issue is complicated by the fact that the director of the films died in 1998, and the current owners of the production company are not filmmakers. It is estimated that it will cost about $500,000 to re-clear the film’s rights. Several scholars also weigh in on the particular importance of screening this documentary publicly, and its unique social benefit.

This Journal of American History review describes the Content of Eyes on the Prize II and lauds it efforts to enlighten the public about the American civil rights movement. The review praises the documentary's use of historical songs and video clips, and its measured look at the civil rights movement's most famous leaders. The review also praises the written companion to the films: Voices of Freedom, and deems both the book and the films useful and important educational tools.

This article argues that the authenticity of real-life images (instead of reenactments) in documentaries is essential, and powerful restrictions on fair use are increasingly erasing the real images from our film culture. Images and video clips, the backbone of documentaries, are increasingly in the hands of high-priced corporate archives. This fact, coupled with the fact that rights are often cleared for only very short periods (thanks to the advent of DVD technology) is severely limiting the leeway filmmakers have in producing genuine cultural products.

This article, appearing in Wired Magazine, describes ongoing grassroots efforts to make Eyes on the Prize available to the masses once again. Locked from DVD production and TV screening due to copyright issues, new copies of Eyes on the Prize are currently not able to be sold. To counter this restriction, a group of file-sharing activists associated with Downhillbattle.org is posting the documentary online. The files will be made available through BitTorrent for downloading via the Internet. In conjunction with this action, a public screening of the film has been scheduled in Washington DC.

This article from Wired News details the ongoing process to get Eyes on the Prize (legally) back into the public sphere. With the help of newly gained funds, the process of re-licensing the many copyrighted images and songs in the series has begun. With $850,000 in grants from the Ford Foundation and private donors, Eyes on the Prize will finally be able to be released on DVD. In a best-case scenario, Eyes on the Prize is on track to be re-released by the fall of 2006.

This article examines the paranoid state of affairs in the modern entertainment arena in regards to copyright. The article adds a new dimension to the issue of protecting copyright by describing a new "spider" that is able to pinpoint the creator of illegal BitTorrent seeds. This extreme crackdown highlights the pervasive "us vs. them" mentality that has kept films like Eyes on the Prize from being distributed. The author calls for a special priority for education documentaries to claim fair use, a move made more difficult by increasingly stringent laws. Digital Rights Management and the clampdown on sometimes-illegal P2P practices such as BitTorrent is a hot topic, since entertainment companies are hoping to keep a tighter grasp on their properties, even if this is at the expense of public enrichment.

Documentary filmmaker Brigid Maher created this short film Stories Untold to accompany the arguments made in Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide's report Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers. This link is a transcript of that film. A link to the streaming, broadband version of the film is available here in streaming .mov format. Speaking with documentary filmmakers, Maher gives the viewer a first-person look at the hardships of fair use clearance. In this film, it is readily apparent that even the simplest video clip or shortest song may cause a myriad of problems for filmmakers.

This article, from The Washington Post, highlights the specific copyright troubles beleaguering Eyes on the Prize. Eyes on the Prize, a documentary about the American Civil Rights movement originally aired on PBS in the 1980's in a serialized format. Since then, however, this film series has become a central part of the debate over fair use and copyright law. Many of the film's clearances for material have expired and the cost of renewing the rights would be several hundred thousand dollars. Consequently, the films cannot presently be publicly shown or distributed legally.

Produced for PBS in the 1980s, Eyes on the Prize is a 14-part series on the American civil rights movement – spanning several decades and containing historical photos and film footage along with interviews and commentary. Eyes on the Prize II contains the last eight installments of the series and spans the years 1965-1985. Eyes on the Prize II features the rise of the Black Panther Party and the development of affirmative action. This part of the series was first broadcast on PBS in 1990.