First thank's for the interesting posting's from Rich and Sean in particular. This public domain topic I find very fascinating. I enjoyed the postings!!! For John: The cheap video releases in bargain bins that are off label in most cases are from prints owned by private film collectors. They use their own print's or a friends print of a title. Both 16mm and 35mm source material is used. I also am a film collector and do have rare television shows and some features too that are rare. They just telecine these to one inch tape as a slave or U-matic 3/4 inch video. For the really poor quality stuff it would not surprise me if they just did a telecine to VHS format. Drop out's and all. Before TV shows became popular for studios to release on DVD I was loaning or selling 16mm television shows for video cassette release. All my stuff was copyright free and public domain. I loaned and sold quite a few 16mm prints of "Marcus Welby MD" for telecine transfer. Also some episodes of "Mannix". These prints were on regular fading eastman stock and had color "dye shift" to pink or red. These were electronically corrected during transfer for color balance. There still are some small companies that put out obscure stuff and in most cases it is from a collector's private collection. I pick up many prints from e-bay. Shokus Video releases stuff that is obscure and mostly likely a major studio won't want it or release it so they do. Studio's were more careful with feature films as far as copyright but they just did not keep up with the numerous episodes of older television show's except ones they deemed special ones. They never envisioned future outlet's for these older tv shows like home video and cable etc. I obtained a feature video transfer for a close relative of "Hogan's Heroes" star Larry Hovis. Larry had written the screenplay and the film was very obscure. I then was able to ask the relative about his residuals. She said Larry received nothing from "Hogan's Heroes" re-runs since it was not in the original contracts. She also told me he received nothing from re-runs of games shows on the game show network as well. They will usually get paid for the first couple of network broadcasts but when the show's went into snyndication they received nothing. I bet a lot of these families are frustrated now with the fad of tv shows on DVD. Hopefully they get something from ALL those out now. --Tom Pennock
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