Eli5 if the nosferatu movie is now public domain why does it need to be rented to be seen are you still able to make money off things after they are public domain?
In: 19
You’re not paying for the licensing of the film, you are paying for the service you are viewing it on.
The word “cheese” isn’t protected by any intellectual property laws, but there’s no law against selling a slip of paper on it with the word “cheese” on it, as long as someone’s willing to buy. Same deal. Anyone is allowed to make copies of it, and anybody can do what they want with those copies, including selling them.
https://archive.org/details/Nosferatu_DVD_quality
You don’t need to rent it. You can legally download it for free. You could also burn it to DVD and sell it to someone if they wanted to buy it. People won’t give the DVD away because it takes more time and effort to produce physical objects.
When it goes public domain, anyone can make money off of it if someone is willing to pay.
Think of books. Older books may be in the public domain, and you can download their text for free online, but the binding of a physical book still costs money. A company can still make a very fancy leather bound edition, for example, and people will be willing to pay good money for it because it’s a really nice copy. There are ways to make the purchase worth the buyer’s while.
When something is copyrighted, all that means is if the one who holds the copyright spots you making a copy and giving it to someone else, without their express permission to do so, they can point and shout, “POLICE! THEY’RE STEALING MY WORK!”, and government-funded police will be compelled to stop you, and slap you with an appropriate punishment.
When a work is in the public domain, it means no one has that kind of legal right. You can do whatever the flip you want with it and no one (as far as the law is concerned) can stop you. That includes packaging it up and trying to sell it to people who you think will pay money for it.
A streaming service or a movie rental store asks you to pay not because they have any kind of copyright on the film itself, but because they are operating the infrastructure that it takes to deliver the movie to you on-demand, and they want to be compensated for keeping that running.
Tap water is free (or nearly free, to some extent) and you can get it in all sorts of places at any time, but sometimes you may be willing to shell out cash for a bottle of water filled from that same tap. You’re not paying for the water, per se, you’re paying for the service of someone going to a place where there is water to be found, putting it into a convenient hand-sized container, and bringing it to where you are now.
Think of really old books in public domain. Every publishing company produces the old dickens novels and sells them for a few bucks. You’re basically paying for the paper and construction of the book. Same is true for a Blu-Ray of Nosferatu. It will be cheap, but it will still have a cost.
Being public domain means anyone can rerelease the film as they see fit. Someone could distribute it for free if they wanted to. But they can also charge for it if they want to.
It’s like with books. Dracula is public domain now, but if I go into the average bookshop and ask for a copy, they’ll still charge me for it. I can get it for free if I want to, there are plenty of places to get it for free legally. But if I want an actual physical book, I have to pay for it.
As one of the other comments shows, there are ways to get the film for free legally. If you wanted to you could burn that to a DVD and start selling your own copies.
When you purchase a copy, you actually own the copy and can do what you want with it. When you purchase a copy of a movie still held in copyright, you own the physical copy in your hand but you only have a limited use license on how you can use it.
Latest Answers