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 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.

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.