Overpriced DVDs?

[David Winter]

No one is saying he forfeited his right to copyright. His speeches, while protected, are still subject to fair use of copyright material. It's no different than any other copyright material.

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: David Winter

Psst ravinhood....how's that for a deal? $1 for like 1 hour and 45 minutes of video? I never saw VHS deals like that. Which makes me wonder if making VHS's actually cost them more than dvd's these days.

Producing a VHS disk always cost more than producing a DVD.. even when VHS/BETA was all the rage. The VHS cassette has moving parts and needs assembly, that is always going to be more expensive than a thin foil with a plastic coating. VHS tape also takes longer to have the content copied to the tape due to the fact of..well of it being a tape. So that longer copy time adds to the cost.

As for the $1 DVD, yeah, the Lone Ranger probably doesn't have a lot of licensing fees associated with it. I wouldn't be surprised if those were simply clearence sale items that were $15 at one point. 

No, they have been that way as long as they have had them (which I guess is going on some four years now), and they have had them far too long and far too numerously for it to be as you have guessed. Thanks for the VHS/dvd cost explanation. I was thinking along those lines somewhat myself, but that was somewhat buttressed by the fact that VHS's are so old now that the cost might go below what is reasonable for that much material.

[Charles2222]

Whether there is such a thing as public domain or not, as far as I can tell it still exists, and people keep calling things that are basically available as free that very thing. Take the movie "The Last Man on Earth" for example. A business that respects copyrights, like I'm sure Google video does, wouldn't allow that vid for free uninterrupted play if that were not so, or at least that's how I look at it. Perhaps that movie wasn't classic enough for Turner?

[Doggie]

ORIGINAL: David Winter

No one is saying he forfeited his right to copyright. His speeches, while protected, are still subject to fair use of copyright material. It's no different than any other copyright material.

Nobody else's speeches are protected. You can quote Dwight Eisenhower or John F Kennedy all you want and show all the pictures you want of them without paying anyone a 'license fee". That's because they are public figures, and it's absolutely ridiculous to think anyone should pay their heir anytime someone publishes a history book or television documentary.

This was done to provide MLK's heirs with an inexhaustable source of income, since there wasn't much of an estate. As novou members of the elite class, they had to have enough money to keep up appearances. It's about redistributing wealth from the serfs to the aristocrats, and since it worked for MLK, there's no reason why Ted Turner and the rest of the elitists shouldn't get in on the deal.

So now you can't play Happy Birthday without paying off some lawyer. No recorded music in pubs. How long will it be before you got to pay Francis Ford Coppola before you can read bedtime stories to your kid? Did you know Big Pharma is trying to copyright DNA? So if you have a natural immunity to disease, they can copyright your white blood cells and use them to make pills they can sell at a hundred times their fair market value.

How long before someone copy rights the English language? Sorry, you'll have to speak Urdu until you cough up a licensing fee.[8|] How much of what you paid for your computer and the software goes to Microsoft. So they were the first to market an operating system? So what? We should pay Bill Gates and his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren until we evolve into telepaths? What if the guy who discovered pork chops had a lawyer? Or beer? Can you image what electronics would cost today if Marconi had a hundred and thirty five year long patent on wireless radio transmissions?

There's a reason there's such a thing as "public domain". It encourages free markets, competition, and technological advancement. Give the first guy who stumbles across a building block a government enforced monoply, and civilization comes to a screeching halt, with a permanent serf/aristocrat sytem becoming the new stagnant social norm.