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Attack of the $1 DVDs
fm6 writes "The NY Times has an interesting piece on DVDs that sell for one or two bucks. Not all of them are crap -- apparently a lot of good movies never got copyrighted properly. But there's no silent movies ('not mass market'), or movies that aren't 'family friendly.' Here's what I find really interesting: none of the DVD companies mentioned in the article sell online -- it's all through discount bins in supermarkets and drug stores."
Yet, I believe you'd find half of Slashdot gripe, and ask for the bittorent...
The only reason these can be sold at a 1.00 USD price point is because the movies in question are public domain. They were first published in the United States on or before 1963, and their copyrights were never renewed. Sending a DVD-Rip to a stranger through BitTorrent in this case would not be an infringement of copyright as long as you don't copy anything introduced in the new edition (primarily the menus and other things that don't make it into a DVD-RIP).
But there's no silent movies ("not mass market"), or movies that aren't "family friendly".
Playback of silent movies on a DVD player needs a soundtrack. All sound recordings published from the invention of the phonograph until February 15, 1972, are restricted under state law copyright until December 31, 2067 (second source), and a bargain-basement DVD distributor such as DigiView doesn't have the resources to do its own dub job.
I was quite enthusiastic when I first saw the cheap public domain DVDs.Unfortunately the transfer usually sucks bad (especially on a computer or hi def screen but even on good old TV) .Flaws in the original print are OK and expected but the bad transfers are unacceptable even for a buck.Many of these look worse than older VHS copies.If I really want to seea nd own the movie I would rather pay 10 for a good clean transfer.
Contrary to article I see silent and R rated euro horror flicks in the buck range.
You can download a lot of these movies from archive.org's moving images library (too lazy to link. Hint: it's at atchive.org). They have a ton of public domain movies, from full length feature films to short educational movies and all kinds of interesting stuff in between
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Uh, copyright is automatic.
Uh, copyright is automatic now. You used to have to register. Not only that, you had to put copyright notices on your stuff, and renew your copyright after a number of years if you wanted it to remain copyrighted. Some things are in the public domain by virtue of neglecting to put (c) on the title card.
Furthermore, stuff created for the government is (or at least was) automatically in the public domain.
-- This void intentionally left null.
I got the first two DVDs of Beverly Hillbillies for $1 each at the grocery store a while back. I had never seen episodes that early, before, and they were all hilarious. We're talking several episodes before they even wrote the lyrics to the theme song. Good stuff.
"The Beverly Hillbillies" always had the lyrics. Those cheap DVD's are a few episodes that fell into public domain. The theme song "Ballad of Jed Clampett" however, ISN'T in the public domain, so the video companies had to change the opening/closing music, or pay royalties on the music. I have several early episodes I bought through Columbia House on VHS in the late 1980's, and the music is intact. You'll find the cheap DVD's of "The Andy Griffith Show" had the opening/closing music changed also, for the same reasons. To get "Andy Griffith" with the original theme, you'd need to buy the Paramount Video releases.
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
The majority of these titles are available at http://www.archive.org/details/feature_films . Additionally I've been distributing the MPEG2 format via Bittorrent at http://torrents.pdmdb.org/
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