that’s why I like Koch Media, I know what’s going on there, it’s a full on, big, media corporation with a SW nerd at the helm of their home vid department 
Yeah, the German SW releasing companies in general seem to be on top of the game right now and I think Koch is upping the expectations of SW dvd releases. I definitely appreciate Wild East putting the effort forth and continuing to release SWs, but my appreciation aside, their releases often leave much to be desired… its a damn shame BlueUnderground gave up on SWs
yeah that is a damn shame, Lustig did a good job with the ones available… he should’ve bought up all that rotten public domain shit on the states and release proper versions of it
how would one go about buying the rights to the public domain stuff anyway? Would you have to buy it from the original film studio, who owned the film in the beginning?
oh sorry my bad, what I meant was, they should just get great material for all the public domain stuff and release them properly on dvds and thus basically putting and to all this endless mediocrity
I agree with you on that point, but I’m not really clear on how the public domain stuff works… could one essentially get a good print of these films somewhere, and release a restored version without having to buy the rights first?
From what I understand, the copyrights on these have expired which makes them public domain, but it still seems like that wouldn’t make it quite legal for these companies that are selling the films… but again I don’t really understand exactly how it works
yes you’re right, i just misexpressed myself that’s exactly what public domain means: nobody has an exclusive right to it. but this only applies to the US, with this Berne Act loophole, for most of these movies. in the EU the situation is completely different. as far as I understand, the ECJ recently ruled that copyrights persist as long as there’s a copyright claim in one of the EU countries… otherwise, it expries after 50 years, and for most of these movies, that isn’t reached yet
ahhh I see… that makes things much clearer. I understood the copyright expiring in the US but I didn’t quite understand how that applies when its a foreign film and obviously someone in another country owned the rights originally
hmm… that’s a very interesting, if questionable opportunity to do some decent releases without a lot of funding. I don’t know how easy it would be to track down good prints of these films though…
apparently not too easy, from what Ally told me… and from what I read in DVD boards from companies who try to get new material from Italy…
I wonder how the average cost is for wildeast to buy and license a particular print for release.
good question. I should try to get Ally to come in here
Good idea.
I’m just guessing, maybe between 500 and 2000 dollars? Day of Anger must’ve cost quite a bit, but most of the others are probably much cheaper, a few 100 each.
I’m interested in knowing how much overhead goes into producing these discs.
I think your cost estimates are quite modest. prints can be that cheap, but the licensing I think can enter the 5 digits easily
That’s interesting. I’ve been curious about how much the licensing costs these companies
well ally said mostly thse licenses are today held by some italian banks so he goes to the auctions etc…
This is all very interesting information to me… is there some place where all these aspects are discussed, like the boards you mentioned? I haven’t had much luck in researching all the points involved with obtaining and releasing old films like this…
not realy, i know a lot from chats with ally, and you might wanna check out the virus-infected Webboards… but aside from that… hard to pin this down to a single spot on the web
Well I doubt that Ally spends 5 digits on licensing these products. He only looks for the movies that are cheaper. The maximum gross revenue per release is 19.95 times 1000 equals 19950, probably less than that since he has to sell wholesale to other online retailers.
In the end it doesn’t look like wildeast profits at all with these releases if he has to spend 10,000 plus per release.
Yes definitely… and Bruckner… Go go go.