DVD Legitimacy

I have been considering buying a complete set of all 558 episodes of "Death Valley Days", but when I asked the vendor about their legitimacy, I never received a response.

Going through their FAQ, I found the following:

Some of these DVD's haven't even been released yet. How is it possible that you sell them?

There is a section of the American copyright law known as "The Berne Act" that Clearly states: films unreleased in the United States, including original versions of films altered and/or edited for release in the United States, are NOT protected by American copyright; thus, they are considered public domain. The entire purpose of our website is to provide otherwise unavailable films or television shows to the serious collector.

I did Google on this a bit, but what I found was unclear. So far as I have found, DVDs of this series are somewhat rare, and very limited in episodes. This leaves me wondering if the Berne Act was referring to films unreleased in the US in general, or just those unreleased in DVDs?

I was under the impression that the copyright to all of the episodes of the series were still currently owned by US Borax, or whatever they are called now.

Manay Pepin,

Obviously, it was released to TV broadcasters, but I'm not sure that it has ever been released in DVD form. What few DVDs that I have found contained exactly the same episodes that are available on the Internet Archive, which only has films in the public domain. Since copy protection applies only to the media and not the film itself, I really don't understand where the original copyright applies? I would only understand how the original copyright would apply to someone who is using the film to make money, not the consumer themselves, since it is very legal to record any film or broadcast of any kind on TV.

Kari said:

Seekermeister, following the logics of that quote in your post, when Windows 7 was officially released 22nd of October 2009 in major markets and languages, it had not been copyright protected in the regions where the launch date was a few days later during the period these regions had to wait.

I believe that source of your quote intentionally misinterprets The Bern Act and international copyright laws.

Kari

Correct me if I'm wrong, but copyright law for software is not the same thing as copyright for films...is it? Whether the quote is accurate or not, it only speaks of films, not software.

EDIT: Also, I believe the subject is only about US copyright law, not international...at least in this particular instance.

Kari said:

A film is intellectual property, too. Like music or software, text of a book or a painting.

That is using too broad of a stroke to define the answer to my question. Copyright, just like patents have limitations. What ownership rights that they start out with are not infinite.

Kari said:

The copyright of a DVD is not for a media itself, the physical DVD disk. It's to protect the contents of that disk, the film.

Perhaps, but I have a lot of DVDs of old movies that are definitely public domain, yet they still carry all of the copy warnings of newer DVDs. If the DVD is not protected, and the film is public domain, what is protected?

At the same time, since it is legal to record (copy) any film broadcast on TV in the US, it would seem that the copy protection actually does apply to the media, since it would not necessarily be known what the source of the copy was, once recorded.

EDIT: This also brings to question what right that a DVD manufacturer has when using film content that is already public domain? The mere fact that they have made a copy does not give them ownership of the content, because the content is already public.