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Movies Media The Almighty Buck

Attack of the $1 DVDs 345

Posted by Zonk from the watch-the-face! dept.
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."
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Attack of the $1 DVDs More

Attack of the $1 DVDs

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  • $1 for a DVD (Score:5, Funny)

    by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:23PM (#12970711) Journal
    Yet, I believe you'd find half of Slashdot gripe, and ask for the bittorent...

    • They're public domain (Score:3, Informative)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      Yet, I believe you'd find half of Slashdot gripe, and ask for the bittorent...

      The only reason these can be sold at a 1.00 USD price point is because the movies in question are public domain. They were first published in the United States on or before 1963, and their copyrights were never renewed. Sending a DVD-Rip to a stranger through BitTorrent in this case would not be an infringement of copyright as long as you don't copy anything introduced in the new edition (primarily the menus and other things t

      • Who said it wa an infringement of anyone's rights? I'm just saying folks are cheap.

        • Re:They're public domain (Score:4, Insightful)

          by reallocate ( 142797 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:39PM (#12970794)
          Slashdot is a bastion of cheapness cowering in a cloak of principle.

          • Re:They're public domain (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Flamebait? This is a perfectly legitimate viewpoint, even if the moderator happens to disagree.

        • Re:They're public domain (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Kent Recal ( 714863 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @06:55PM (#12971092)
          I don't think I'm cheap. But I'm lazy.
          So give me a torrent over any physical media any time.

          Torrent also saves me the hassle of ripping the damn thing to my mediabox.

          So, is that bad, am I hurting anyone?
          You made it sound as if that's a bad thing.

          • I find rips just more convenient (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Phil Urich ( 841393 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @10:46PM (#12972022) Journal
            Parent, I wholeheartedly agree.

            Honestly, it's not like I don't own movies, music, etc . . . actually, I own a LOT. But I always rip the ones I have, if I haven't already downloaded them (and thus bought them because I liked them so much, and wanted to actually own them, for principle or posterity or 'cause they were on some crazy $1.50 sale or etc) simply because it's sooo much more convenient.

            Comparing TV series saved on CD to DVD, if I'm watching on my computer, it's much easier to just pop in the disc and double-click on the episode, instead of having to actually navigate menus, wait while there's time delays, and so forth. And proper rips, I can just switch at a moments notice between normal audio and, say, a commentary track, so if I'm listening to the directors talking, and then I go "oh, yeah, I want to just re-watch that scene in normal right now" I can actually do that in seconds instead of the convoluted process in DVDs.

            It's the difference that comes with having a format that's the raw media (relatively speaking) instead of it tucked away inside of virtual packaging. These points could go on and on, but I'm sure anyone reading /. knows the kinds of things I'm talking about (like just queuing up multiple episodes, easy skipping, etc). Generally, I'm actually quite unimpressed with the lack of user-friendlyness of DVDs and whatnot; for CDs, it's just albums, but for DVDs I expect something less arcane. Oh, it's great for the average consumer, yada yada, but I've (yes, often illegally) seen it done in ways so much simpler for my needs (and since I have enough access to computers with s-video out, no advantage to having it on DVD players for me) I therefore can't quite abide by non-ripping ways.

            And so, yeah, for these movies it just makes sense for them, what with being in public domain and all, to be so easily available for download and distribution as rips.

            Hey, even if the industry complains "free movies cut into our profit!", well them, you'll just have to make things that are new and interesting enough that people will want to buy the new ones even while they can get the classics for free. Hah, now that might make you get off your asses and do something worthwhile, now you have to compete with your own past!

      • Re:They're public domain (Score:4, Funny)

        by nkh ( 750837 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:46PM (#12970824) Journal
        Public domain? Not really, most $1 DVDs I've seen are very-very-cheap horror movies or action movies with "fake" movie stars (for example some guy who looks like Stallone even if you know he's not the real one). Most of these movies have just failed to be shown in the theaters due to a story 10 times more boring than the usual "Arnold".

        The funny thing is that today, in those discount bins, I've found the movie 1984! I was looking forward to seeing if the adaptation from the book was good :)

        • Re:They're public domain (Score:4, Funny)

          by rjrjr ( 28310 ) <[rjrjr] [at] [pobox.com]> on Saturday July 02, 2005 @10:13PM (#12971875) Homepage
          How was the quality of the 1984 DVD?

        • Re:They're public domain (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Reziac ( 43301 ) * on Sunday July 03, 2005 @01:04AM (#12972428) Homepage Journal
          I've seen quite a few classics, from both film and TV, in these one-buck-DVD bargain bins. A few that I recall off the top of my head:

          --Jungle Book, starring Sabu
          --episodes from the original Superman TV series
          --various Sherlock Holmes films (with Basil Rathbone)

          Some were in standard DVD cases with nice labels, some in cheap cello and cardboard. But for a buck, who cares?

          And I think the guy quoted in the article is wrong about silent movies -- the same audience that is interested in the above are also interested in silents, especially serials.

          Even if I had broadband, and even when the file is free and legal, I certainly couldn't be bothered to locate, download, and burn a film that I could buy for a buck. IMO their only mistake is in not making their catalogs cover a sufficiently broad range of titles and eras.

      • Maybe. I'm not really sure if this issue has ever been decided regarding video, but it's quite possible that the MPEG-2 stream could be claimed as copyrighted. When Penguin Books goes through, say, Great Expectations, and does layout, changes punctuation to match the American rules, etc. their version is copyrighted.

        It's entirely possible that a studio could argue that the physical process of scanning the film and encoding it would also grant a copyright to that particular version, even though the origin

        • I'm not really sure if this issue has ever been decided regarding video, but it's quite possible that the MPEG-2 stream could be claimed as copyrighted. When Penguin Books goes through, say, Great Expectations, and does layout, changes punctuation to match the American rules, etc. their version is copyrighted.

          Not necessarily. From Copyright Office circular 14 [copyright.gov], with my emphasis:

          To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material. Making minor changes or additions of little substance to a preexisting work will not qualify the work as a new version for copyright purposes. The new material must be original and copyrightable in itself. Titles, short phrases, and format, for example, are not copyrightable.

    • Re:$1 for a DVD (Score:3, Informative)

      by RichardX ( 457979 )
      You can download a lot of these movies from archive.org's moving images library (too lazy to link. Hint: it's at atchive.org). They have a ton of public domain movies, from full length feature films to short educational movies and all kinds of interesting stuff in between

      • Re:$1 for a DVD (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ottothecow ( 600101 )
        indeed. there are actually some excellent movies there (charade with audrey hepburn comes to mind)

        They are in many different formats including full-resolution DVD sized mpeg

    • Available at archive.org (Score:5, Informative)

      by ppcvidz.com ( 732109 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @08:03PM (#12971367)
      The majority of these titles are available at http://www.archive.org/details/feature_films [archive.org] . Additionally I've been distributing the MPEG2 format via Bittorrent at http://torrents.pdmdb.org/ [pdmdb.org]

  • Can't beat the price/performance ratio... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by moz25 ( 262020 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:25PM (#12970722) Homepage
    Well, at $1 per DVD, it beats even free downloading in terms of time and space costs... plus, you get a free DVD to have a backup on. I have been noticing a lot of relatively cheap DVDs ($4-5 range) lately actually. Perhaps part of a parallel-running strategy against ripping?
    • I got a bunch of these $1 DVDs at Wal-Mart months ago. The classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead and the excellent and dark 1950 version of DOA [imdb.com] were both good picks.

      Unfortunately, most of the other ones were crap. Mostly just bad movies and/or bad acting, but on one of them the audio was so distorted that you couldn't understand what people are saying.

      Still, it's hard to go wrong for a buck.
      • A few more good ones I've gotten this way:
        * White Zombie (the 1930s-vintage movie with Bela Lugosi, not the band)
        * Dementia 13, the first Francis Ford Coppola movie
        * Kimba the White Lion...sure, it doesn't have the original Japanese soundtrack and subtitles, it's got a crap Canadian dubtrack done on the cheap in the '80s, but dammit, it's Tezuka-sensei!
        * Some Pre-Code Betty Boop shorts, unfortunately with crappy colorization (thank Goddess for Archive.Org!)
        * Some early Gumby shorts, including "Gumbasia" whi
    • It's exactly what it is -- plus, most of those DVDs are at Walmart who are able to get huge lots of DVDs and sell them super cheap to get people into the stores.

      The *only* reason I go to Walmart is to dig through the $5 DVD bin. I have gotten some decent titles (Antitrust, Short Circuit, Thomas Crown Affair, Fatal Attraction, and Turner and Hooch to name only a few) that I enjoy enough to own.

      It does take time to go through them and find anything worthwhile (there's a lot of 4 TV episode DVDs such as the
  • I've seen some of those DVDs at a local Half Price Books for around $9. If I was at all interested in any of them, I would be getting robbed! Oh, the scandal!

  • Shipping costs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:26PM (#12970729)
    none of the DVD companies mentioned in the article sell online -- it's all though discount bins

    There's a simple reason for this. Most people will think, "Gee, I'd like to buy that for $1 online but I won't pay $2 for shipping and handling on something that only costs $1"

    To sell online they need to bump the price up to $3 online to subsidize the shipping and nominally charge 50 cents to ship.
    • Why? How much does shipping a DVD cost? If it's more than about 50 then NetFlix can't be making any money at all. I would imagine it's significantly less that this when you are shifting any kind of volume. Don't forget that these don't need to come in the standard, large, DVD boxes, they can perfectly happily come in something not much larger than the DVD itself.
      • I'm guessing 50-75 cents for the mailer and one dollar or so USPS, FedEx UPS, minimum. Add in the cost of paying someone to retrieve, package and ship and you're easily in the $3 range. The margin on a $1 product -- any $1 product -- is so low that costs need to be minimal.
        • Well you would guess very wrong. The USPS has a special media rate that includes DVDs and is dirt cheap. And the mailer needs to be no fancier than the cardboard sleve that AOL sends out CDs in (in fact that's about what you get with the $1 bin DVD's except those are square and to be mailed cheaply I think the mailer has to be rectangular.I assure you that the last 60 CDs that AOL didn't spend anywhere near the $3 range each to send me the last 50 CDS they mailed me, and it would not cost much more to send

          • The USPS has a special media rate that includes DVDs and is dirt cheap.

            Media mail starts at $1.42. Most DVDs in their case can be sent for $1.06 or $1.29. The main purpose of media mail is to send books - heavy items which would otherwise cost a lot to send.

    • Re:Shipping costs (Score:3, Interesting)

      by zurab ( 188064 )

      There's a simple reason for this. Most people will think, "Gee, I'd like to buy that for $1 online but I won't pay $2 for shipping and handling on something that only costs $1"

      To sell online they need to bump the price up to $3 online to subsidize the shipping and nominally charge 50 cents to ship.

      Even with shipping at $3, I would think most people who would buy these DVDs at $1 would not buy only one item and pay $3 shipping on it. I would guess they'd pick 10-15 at a time and pay about the same in shi

    • I know exactly what you mean. An online store was selling some older games for $4 each a while back. I tried to buy 3 of them, and they wanted about $20 for delivery! I did end up getting them, and was surprised to find a $12 stamp on the envelope - what happened to the other $8?

    • Re:Shipping costs (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rm999 ( 775449 )
      I don't think it costs much more than 50 cents to ship a dvd (with minimal packing - think netflix) and 25 cents to create a dvd (if done in bulk). I think they could make a profit selling $1.50 dvd's, especially because they don't need to pay for retail space.

      I just don't understand the point of buying most of the crap they sell for a dollar. A dollar for a dvd is a dollar too much for something you won't watch. It's sad to see people at walmart going nuts over the dollar DVDs thinking they are getting so

    • Re:Shipping costs (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      If the disk sells for $1 at Safeway, the company that makes them gets maybe 40 cents. They could sell for the full retail online (without the S&H bullshit) and still make at least as much money as they get through regular channels. I think the problem is that they can't make enough sales online to justify the hassle of a web store. Most customers are probably impulse shoppers: "Killer Shrews? Oh well, it's only a buck."
  • Your first fifteen DVDs only 99 cents!*
    *By soliciting this offer, you agree to purchase thirty more DVDs at regular price. Cannot be combined with any other offer.

  • That's not the reason (Score:2, Interesting)

    by quiklan ( 724769 )
    The reason you don't see these online is because the wal-marts and the likes order millions at a time and that's why the price is so low. I work at one of the companies that produces these, there's not much of a profit to be made.
    • >> there's not much of a profit to be made

      Ok, fair enough, but this does give us a rough idea what the absolute base minimum distribution and manufacturing costs are for a DVD. If you don't have to create the content, pay the talent, or distribute through Mom & Pop retailers, you can make a (albeit small) profit selling for a buck retail.

      If you want to pay for special effects, Bruce Willis, and intend sell product at the local IGA, that costs the consumer $19.95.

      It's going to be really interes
  • For a while there was a Bitpasss-enabled provider:
    99 Cent Movies:
    http://www.ninety-nine-cent-movies.com/ [ninety-nin...movies.com]
    but the URL doesn't workanymore.

    Alex.

  • All soundtracks are copyrighted (Score:5, Informative)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepplesNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:34PM (#12970768) Homepage Journal

    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 [pdinfo.com] (second source [joegratz.net]), and a bargain-basement DVD distributor such as DigiView doesn't have the resources to do its own dub job.

    • So why do you need sound for a silent movie? Sounds like an oxymoron to me.
    • Playback of silent movies on a DVD player needs a soundtrack.

      But that soundtrack doesn't need sound. It's trivial to make an uncopyrighted silent soundtrack for a DVD.

      All sound recordings published from the invention of the phonograph until February 15, 1972, are restricted under state law copyright until December 31, 2067

      Guess what; as far as anyone knows, this applies to the soundtrack for any movie. And you always have the option of not shipping to New York, which, as far as I know, is the only one

  • Kun Fu Fighting! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Malicious ( 567158 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:35PM (#12970777)
    It's so True! Bruce Li could kick some serious ass! And Bruce J Lee? He was a MACHINE. Then there's Bruce Lei, that guy knew his way around a pair of nunchucks I tell you.
  • >> ...none of the DVD companies mentioned in the article sell online...

    Because shipping costs would exceed the purchase price. Either the vendor would have to eat shipping cost (meaning no profit and, hence, no $1 DVD's) or the buyers would pay shipping cost (meaning the $1 DVD now costs about $3.)

    Easier to buy them by the pound and dump them in the bins.

  • hold on now... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:40PM (#12970795)
    Okay, show of hands...
    who thinks movies from 60 years ago should still have copyright protection?

    I see.. the frozen hand of Walt Disney..
    anyone else?

    (please note I would be in favor of laws which change when the term of copyright /starts/)
    • you seem to be saying you'd approve of a law whereby a work enjoyed no copright protection for an initial time period, and then enjoyed its usual period of protection.

      Care to enlarge on that idea?

    • Re:hold on now... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) * <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday July 02, 2005 @07:44PM (#12971291) Journal

      I see.. the frozen hand of Walt Disney..

      Actually, I'm pretty sure Walt Disney would not raise his hand. It's his successors that want to own everything forever.

  • Works for me.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:45PM (#12970821)
    I picked up a handfull of cartoons for my grandson and a handful of old B movies for myself at the local grocery store for a $1 each.
    They sold out quickly. I hope they will get some more in and some new titles.
    A $1 is a bargin and really what most of them are really worth.

    When I was a kid, the ticket at the theater was about $1.50, that was in the 60's...

    I've recently seen mention that the ticket to see a new movie is around $9.00 BS on that!
    The only movies that have come out in the past 30+ years that were actually worth the trouble and expense to go and see were the LOTR movies and those didn't come out of Hollyweird, which explains why they were of good quality and good content.

    No matter though, all the theaters in this area have gone out of business anyway. The nearest one is a 35 mile drive. With $9 to get in, $5 for a heatlamp special and $4 for a cup of ice with a splash of soda water, I can tell you this, I will never again go to a movie theater. Oh yeah, and of course there's the gas to drive there. At $2.5+ a gallon, I only drive when it's a life and death emergency..

    IF, and that's a BIG IF, a decent movie ever comes out, I just wait for it to hit DVD and buy it then. I would rather spend $14-16 on it and have it to do with as I please than to spend $40+ to see it once in a room full of crying babies, kids acting up, people chatting on cell phones, etc...

    Hollywood needs to get real. With the raping they keep putting on people at the ticket booth it's little wonder people pirate the movies. If they would cut the salaries of the fat cats at the top of the food chain in half and the self-important actors and actresses, that would be a step in the right direction.

    But for now, $1 is more than a fair price..

    • Wal-Mart dumps a bunch of DVD movies into a bin [mintruth.com] and sells them for about $4 a piece. You need to dig but you do find some gems [mintruth.com] in there if you look.

      Worth it when you find 4 Gary Cooper movies (2 Disc set) for $4 and Return of the Pink Panther for another $4. I guess it all depends on your taste, but there is stuff in there for everyone (Airheads, Freddy Got Fingered, Road to Bali, The Man with Two Brains, etc).
    • Incredible that this is the top moderated article. Is this really the attitude building up around here? I may have a DLP projector in my living room, but I'm not counting every penny it costs to see Batman Begins. (And you don't have to buy a popcorn and coke).

      In the last 30 years I'm glad to have seen many, many great movies made by Hollywood Studios, along with films made by independent production companies. I was gonna list some great recent movies made by the majors, but what for?

      Look man, enjoy
      • Ahem, some of us can't afford to blow 20$ just to see a movie. (I like to bring a date when I can)

        What market do you think netflix is aimed at anyway?
    • I've recently seen mention that the ticket to see a new movie is around $9.00 BS on that!

      Try £15 (~$30) in the West-End cinemas in London... it's cheaper to get the train to a different city to see the movie than pay that price!
    • Hello,
      I get DVDs at the local library. They circulate for free. The best picks are usually in the metro branch libraries on the border of the city and the suburbs or the branch of the suburban county library system located in the neighborhood with the most college graduates. Check also on-line listings for the local library. You can often have the titles sent to your closest neighborhood branch. Rural patrons can often have titles mailed to them at reduced postal rates.

      The library has a fair amou

    • Re:Works for me.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @07:56PM (#12971342) Homepage

      When I was a kid, the ticket at the theater was about $1.50, that was in the 60's...
      $1.50 sounds to me like a lot of money in the 60s. Let's hop on over to http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm [bls.gov]
      and adjust that 1.50 into 2005 dollars.

      You don't specify which year of the 60s you're talking about, let's do a range of years:

      1960: $9.85
      1965: $9.26
      1969: $7.95

      So that $1.50 movie in the 60s is about the same cost as it is now, after adjusting for inflation. People tend to forget the huge inflation that happened in the 1970s. Sure movies are more expensive, but people also make a lot more money to keep up with increased cost of living.

  • NY Times Discovers USB (Score:4, Insightful)

    by writermike ( 57327 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:53PM (#12970848)
    Sometimes folks poke fun at the NYTimes because, on technology, they sometimes seem so far behind the times it's snickerable (not quite laughable).

    I think this article is such an example. Extremely low-cost movies in grocery stores and bargain bins have been around for YEARS. Perhaps the only difference today -- and I think we can quibble on what 'today' means -- is that instead of Betty Boop on VHS, she's on a DVD.

  • What We Pay More Not To... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:56PM (#12970854) Homepage
    And mostly you don't get any: the vast majority of dollar DVD's start playing the moment they're loaded.

    And the rest of us geniuses pay about $14 more to NOT have this?! Man, I bet these DVDs don't even have that annoying FBI warning since some of them are in the public domain. These cheap DVDs already have the top 2 out of 3 items on my wish list for DVDs. Now, they just need to have a good movie to go along with the DVD. ;-)

    • What they mean by this is that these movies tend to have no menus and no chapters. It's a bit of a pain, actually. If you remove the disk in the middle of watching, you have to fast forward though the whole damn thing.
    • I bet these DVDs don't even have that annoying FBI warning since some of them are in the public domain.

      Nope, all of them I've seen have an FBI warning. Some have gone so far as to tell you it's illegal to loan the movie to someone else.

  • Some of the Highlights I've bought (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeCommodore ( 567479 ) <larry@portcommodore.com> on Saturday July 02, 2005 @05:58PM (#12970861) Homepage
    Here are some I had found that were really good:
    • Popeye Cartoons (there is a series of four discs, very good qulaity
    • Santa Claus vs. the Martians (a true classic!)
    • Off the wall and calssic horror movies - Bela Lugosi meets the Brooklyn Gorilla and other obvious 60s/70s schlock
    • classics like Road to Bali and the Inspector General
    • Some Little Rascals Episodes
    • Three stooges cartoons (I haven't had the guts to grab those, they are pretty lame)
    Everytime I see such a display I find it worth my tme.
    • I got the first two DVDs of Beverly Hillbillies for $1 each at the grocery store a while back. I had never seen episodes that early, before, and they were all hilarious. We're talking several episodes before they even wrote the lyrics to the theme song. Good stuff.

      • I got the first two DVDs of Beverly Hillbillies for $1 each at the grocery store a while back. I had never seen episodes that early, before, and they were all hilarious. We're talking several episodes before they even wrote the lyrics to the theme song. Good stuff.
        "The Beverly Hillbillies" always had the lyrics. Those cheap DVD's are a few episodes that fell into public domain. The theme song "Ballad of Jed Clampett" however, ISN'T in the public domain, so the video companies had to change the opening/c
        • I beg to differ. On one of the DVDs, the first couple episodes had just an instrumental bluegrass theme, and then the theme song as we all know it happened in one episode without lyrics, and the next episode it was sung with lyrics as the theme song. If your statement were true, that would not have been possible all on one DVD.
        • Of those Popeye DVDs I mentioned the first three had the original music at the beginning, on the last one they obviously put in some MIDI or other sythesiser music on the openings probably due to the rights issues as well. It is very distracting when you are used to the originals.

          At least it sin't bad compared to the more expensive (sub$5) Good Times Video Popeye DVDs where they tried to re'foley' the sound effects and made the cartoons nearly unviewable with these really loud and irritating sound effects

    • Here are some I had found that were really good... Off the wall and calssic horror movies.

      There are some decent ones out there. I got Night of the Living Dead for one buck at Target. I thought that was an awsome deal.

    • Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is available at archive.org. [archive.org]

      q

  • McClintock, and a few other good films. You can find some really decent stuff in the dollar range if you're willing to concede that you're not going to get a anything recent or requiring high royalties.

    The packaging was crap, but that's ok, since well, they were a buck each. My bigger concern was that the various titles shared UPC codes, which meant that I wasn't able to enter them into DVD Profiler (not going to link, find it yourself)
  • Because of the expired or mishandled copyrights on these titles, a new generation now has an opportunity to rediscover them at bargain-basement prices. In other words, because of a LACK of copyrights on them, they are providing benefits to society through their artistic value (nevermind that calling a movie like The Killer Shrews "artistic" is a bit of a stretch. I think you get what I mean though.)

    Isn't enriching the public as a whole supposed to be what copyrights are for? Yet, in nearly every case today,

    • Oh, and just a side note: Before you go ahead and label me a "commie pinko", or whatever, know that I'm a miniarchist libertarian. I simply believe that copyrights are not a legitimate function of government.

      When making a poltical comment on a public discussion forum, *never* label your political position like this. The position that the copyright system is broken is perfectly reasonable, but this sort of comment associates it with radical political beliefs helping those who believe that politics

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • secret to cheap dvds (Score:4, Interesting)

    by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Saturday July 02, 2005 @06:39PM (#12971017)
    The real secret to cheap dvds is pawn shops. I've gotten most of the "classic" disney movies on dvd from a local pawn shop slowly over the past year - never paid more than $8 for one of 'em.
  • True story: Went to the local Mal-Wart (Milpitas, CA) on Thursday. An aisle display had several hundred $1 DVDs in cardboard sleeves marked "Family DVDs." Prominently featured was Romero's Night Of The Living Dead.

    Seems like family standards are, um, 'evolving' at the Wart.

  • He has nearly finished a first draft of "Killer Shrews II." The plot is fiendishly simple. "I return to Shrew Island to rescue a bunch of teenagers," he reported. "A new mad scientist has turned herself into a human shrew that not only chews, but swims."

    And we're expected to pay a dollar for this masterpiece???
  • They're only 88 cents.
  • "The vast majority of dollar DVD's start playing the moment they're loaded."

    No wonder they're successful.

    I've been asking for years and years why expensive DVDs can't do this. When you put the disk in the player, and the DEFAULT action should be... PLAY THE MOVIE.

    This should at the very least be a user-preference option you can configure in the player.

    I hate having to wait through a minute of non-skippable crap in order to be given the opportunity to tell my DVD player that what I want to do is (imagine

  • Cereal Boxes are key (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PhYrE2k2 ( 806396 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @12:44AM (#12972374)
    Even cheaper is movies in cereal boxes I've seen the past few year. As opposed to toys, those crazy gewy things in captain crunk, and whatnot cheerios and others seem to include DVDs of Disney movies that are still great for kids.

    Not quite what the article is talking about, but sure is cheaper than $1.

  • Robocop catch phrase Soooo appropriate (Score:4, Funny)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Sunday July 03, 2005 @06:55AM (#12973151) Journal
    As soon as I saw the headline for the article...the FIRST thing that popped into my mind was that stupid phrase from the First Robocop movie that I could'nt get out of my head....

    Damn IT slashdot!

    "I'll buy THAT for a dollar!"

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