$1 DVD’s Bring Quality Films Home Due To Copyright Problems

Ever see that bin at the supermarket or dollar store filled with DVD’s and kept on walking thinking, “They must be crap if they’re only a dollar!”?  If you have, you may want to stop and check them out next time.  Many of the films starring greats from John Wayne to Shirley Temple and TV series from Dragnet to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are being mass marketed at the dollar pricepoint simply due to problems with, or lack of copyrights. “The Killer Shrews,” the masterwork of Ray Kellogg, is one of hundreds of cheap old films now available as ridiculously cheap new DVD’s. Because of lapsed or improperly registered copyrights, even some very watchable movies - among them, Howard Hawks’s “His Girl Friday,” Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dementia 13” - are now in the public domain and can be sold by anyone.”

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