“Is this legal?”
The year was 2007, we had been providing some of our valued Customers at EDGE Video in Brewer Maine with Obscure, out-of-print or never in-print movies on DVD-Rs that we special ordered at their request from various websites. Eventually I was asked by the customers about the legality of the discs. That simple question sent me on a decades long legal research mission that actually continues to this day. Since we were special ordering more and more titles for our Brick & Mortar customers, I needed an answer. The question was pretty clear: “How were there hundreds, maybe thousands of websites legally selling these handmade copies of rare movies?”
The most common legal theory I could come up with was that many of these movies were “Orphan Works” and selling them was “Fair Use”.
Orphan Works are movies, or really any copyright-protected art, where the owners of the copyright could not be located with a reasonable search and Fair Use is part of Copyright Law, where certain uses of copyrighted material would NOT be Infringement.
Around this time, I was experimenting with different selling and content-creating websites to try to come up with additional revenue streams for our business. Based upon my legal research on Fair Use and Orphan Works, I came up with a site that eventually became: findraredvds.com.
The concept was hardly original. I adopted the basic design from all the other sites that I had purchased Orphan Works from for the last couple years. Then I did a deep dive on each and every title to make sure, to the best of my knowledge, that each film/TV movie that was placed on our new site was in fact, an Orphan Work.
findraredvds.com took off in a big way and soon the revenue dwarfed the money coming in from other on-line projects. Also, the writing which had been rumored for years was finally on the wall: The brick & mortar video stores were on life support and their demise was inevitable. But EDGE Video was still growing, by 2012, we had four store fronts in Bangor, Brewer and Ellsworth, Maine.
But I knew I had to make some changes, so we started converting them into pawn-type shops specializing in various media, electronics, phones, etc. All the time, findraredvds.com kept growing and getting more on-line traffic. It may have been growing too fast and my attention was still focused on our storefronts.
We, like all businesses, had customer complaints. It was something we struggled with, but I considered it to be growing pains and eventually we would get a handle on it. In 2012, Edge Video received a letter from the Maine Attorney general that wanted to talk about our customer complaints and business practices. I hired an attorney to deal with the situation. We replied with a letter, doubled down on trying to keep with the customer complaints and never heard from the Attorney General again.
In early 2014, I contracted some sort of virus. Apparently, it was similar to the COVID virus. I was very sick, went to the hospital, and within hours I was on a ventilator and in a coma. The prognosis was not good.
My family was all called in, etc. etc . But then, I started to come out of it. Now I had always told Heidi, my partner in business and life, that if anything ever happens to me, she should just liquidate the stores and move on in life.