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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."
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.
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.
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/