Think of starting website selling obscure horror and exploitation movies

D

dayo

New member
Having looked into many films ive seen most are not owned by any company and as such are in the public domain. Ive seen a few American companies are doing it....and how they legally get round selling them but ive wondered....would there be a demand for it here in the UK?
Obviously its not professional and it is DVD-R with custom artwork etc, but if the prices are decent enough, and the shipping time is good surely it must do well?

Obviously getting a catalogue together will be hard, maybe having to buy all the films from other websites first, but i have my own ideas on that too...I suppose the hard part is putting together some kind of website, getting someone who can do the artwork etc. In America i notice most places use this disclaimer:

The section of American copyright law known as "The Berne Act" states: films unreleased in the United States, including original version of films altered and/or edited for release in the United States, are not protected by American copyright; thus, they are considered public domain. All of our films have either never been released in the USA or are long out of print and have not come out on DVD yet. Once one of our films comes back into print it will be removed from our stock and not be sold anymore.

Ill have to check and see if this covers the UK too, but any ideas any of you have are welcome.
 
Actually, it's already been done.... Visual-Pain ran successfully for a number of years, and supplied a variety of obscure and classic genre movies on DVD-R including the Italian gallios, Japanese mega violent horror and workprints of a number of european and US titles. Sadly it's original owner sold the site off, and the new owner in turn sold the masters of all it's titles to an american site. In it's day I bought many movies from them, including the original workprint of Samhain, a host of "nasties" and even BBC's classic "ThreaRAB".

So good luck to you... I, for one, will be watching closely for further developments.

" When there's no more room in hell, the dead will shop for DVRAB"
 
What ive found by my research today is i cant find much about the owners of the sites. So i dont know if their are legit companys or wether they are home businesses or small businesses run by frienRAB. Not that it matters considering the films are in the public domain and are free to be sold but it would have given me an idea just how much of a business it is. Ive only got american sites to compare to and some are expensive, the figure i had in mind was around
 
If it can be done legitimately,then couldn't you just set up a ebay shop to test the waters? It would also give you the chance to see what people mostly want.
I don't know if ebay would allow you to sell independently made copies,but if they do,it would save the time and expense on creating your own site.

There are some old (30's - 60's) British films that I have been after for sometime.Many have never been released on DVD or home video.Many of these sell for
 
Ebay policy is that anything recorded on dvd-r is banned.

The Public Domain laws are in the US.

There are no such laws in the UK .

Regardless of whether films are in the PD in the US you would still be breaking the law here.

I would put enough research into ensure that anything you release does not have any interested parties at all because in the US even PD properties are still owned by a legit company.

Take It's A Wonderful Life.

Its PD in the US so tv and dvd copies can be done for free.
But Paramount own it and they are the only ones who can access original vault materials to release dvd's of quality

Although IIRC there was a legal case in the US a short while ago questioning the whole PD situation but I dont recall how / if it concluded.

Releasing this stuff in the UK is fraught with possible problems.

1) Legal owners can crop up
2) DVD-R not allowed on ebay
3) All titles legally have to go to the BBFC so you would fall down there immediately and adding
 
Im not so sure, after their fees and selling fees then paypal fees. I cant really do anything until i get some kind of catalogue together. Wether thats specialist (horror, crime, silent film etc) i dont know. Or just a little bit of everything.
 
I guess that would make it more legal.

But I'm sure even in Jersey there are laws and limits to stick to.

There is no doubt that ebay would be the best place to sell unless you were lucky enough to get some key titles.

How do you access the materials.

PD material will usually mean a substandard copy off tv or vhs .

Film prints would cost a fortune to transfer to dvd even if you could access them.
 
if someones already got a decent copy of something, nowadays its much more likely to be released onto the torrent sites, rather than messing about with physical media.

the bfi have some old stuff available for free on their website, but its released under a creative commons licence, probably set so you cant do anything with it commercially.

with the ease of getting content digitised & online nowadays, those back catalogues are also likely to be worth more than they were say 5 years ago.
 
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