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Is this true about making bootlegs of movies?

posted 2 years ago by Ticketsplease (4024)
9 replies | jump to latest

A guy on eBay was making his own DVDs of 80s movies from companies that went bust, no longer exist, therefore he said the copyright was gone and be could make his own DVDs.

True?

[–] mtxmind (3296) 2 years ago

The short answer: No. Unless the defunct companies somehow messed up the initial copyright registration, the copyrights would maybe go to creditors or somebody else. Maybe?

Not too sure on this one, but I don't think he has a right to do what he's doing. Somebody still has to have rights of some kind to these films.

[–] WandererFromYs (2406) 2 years ago

That’s basically the reason that Night of the Living Dead fell into the public domain. If you look up dvds for it, 30 different versions will pop up, because anyone can legally slap it on a dvd and sell it.

[–] mtxmind (3296) 2 years ago

Kind of the same thing happened with "Manos: The Hands of Fate". It was never clear if Hal Warren had properly copyrighted it (he did properly copyright the script but apparently mistakenly thought that would apply to the film as well), and after MST3k popularized it, there was a slew of companies releasing it. Hal's son has been fighting for rights to it for years now, going so far as to trying to trademark the film title itself. I don't know if he's had any sucess with that.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

Yeah, copyright law used to be pretty strict and unforgiving. If you left out the copyright symbol or the word copyright on prints of the movie, it went right into public domain.

[–] capuchin (3369) 2 years ago

Copyright doesn't automatically expire on a company's bankruptcy, no. The film catalogue rights are probably the company's chief asset and get treated accordingly, usually being sold.

For example, Cannon Group's back catalogue is now split between MGM (Amazon), Paramount and Warner who each bought various chunks of it.

MGM owns most of United Artists' stuff.

But, of course, whether copyrights are enforced or not depends on who holds them. It often happens with smaller companies that no-one really wants or cares about the catalogue, because they don't think there's any money to be made, so although someone ultimately holds the copyright (creditors, whoever), they may not want to do anything with it or enforce any claims on the material.

Furthermore, copyrights can get lost in legal limbo for years, even decades, when there's a dispute over ownership, which often follows a company's collapse.

So the answer is technically no, but if no-one's coming after him for it, no-one's coming after him for it. Personally, I think it's morally OK if the films in question aren't available through more legitimate means, but that obviously isn't a legal position.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

might be in the public domain.

[–] DarthAckbar (2317) 2 years ago

yep

[–] tsrt (1177) 2 years ago

It may depend on what country he is in. Copyrights used to expire after 25 years in China IIRC.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

I think there's some truth to that. I know something like it happened with the movie Rad. The production company pretty much shut down, but for some reason the rights to Rad weren't sold and it went out of print.

For a long time, the only way to get Rad was from a bootleg source like the guy on ebay that you're talking about. And that's a rare situation. Usually when a company shuts down everything that has any value is sold off.

I'm kind of curious about what other movies this seller has, since I don't know of any other movies where this is the case.