Re: Institutional v. Home Use Video

Jessica Rosner (jrosner@kino.com)
Mon, 11 Feb 2002 14:15:21 -0800 (PST)

I am very sympathetic to companies like Arab film distributors and they
really have no choice but to charge higher institutional prices. If they did
not they could not afford to put them out at all. They could skip the lower
price entirely but I know they feel strongly that they want as wide an
audience as possible. As for PBS, I think they can live without the extra
money. PPR is important if you want films you can use for actual public
programs and SOMETIMES but not always it also includes campus broadcast
rights which you might use. However since as I have tried to point out , it
is totally impossible to get PPR on many important titles , you can't really
use this for entire class syllabus so its a major problem.

For the most part PPR rights are just an "extra" that you may never have
need of but helps smaller distributors justify the high cost. Normally Kino
only sells PPR on request but I am just finishing up a flyer for three films
by Souleymane Cisse and there is NO WAY we could release these UNLESS we
sell them at high price and include the PPR. Most obscure foreign films and
non-fiction works DON'T sell thousand of copies and if they are going to be
available at all to the academic community , the are going to cost a lot
more than a Disney film

-- 
Jessica Rosner
Kino International
333 W 39th St. 503
NY NY 10018
jrosner@kino.com


> From: "Hornbeck, Patty" <hornbeck@jaguar.middlebury.edu>
> Reply-To: videolib@library.berkeley.edu
> Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 12:57:50 -0800 (PST)
> To: Multiple recipients of list <videolib@library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Institutional v. Home Use Video
> 
> Today I was searching the Facets site and found two versions of the same
> title: a home-use video priced at $40 and an institutional video with public
> performance rights for $90. This trend toward double-pricing has been
> increasingly evident in the market. PBS now offers both home-use and
> institutional video and will sell educational institutions either version.
> Some other companies will not sell the home-use version to colleges at all,
> but only to individuals. This effectively circumvents the classroom use
> exemption for home-use- only videos.
> What do you all think about this? I'm not sure how I feel. On the one
> hand(Arab Film Distribution being a case in point), you have a distributor
> doing important work that should/needs to be subsidized by the higher price.
> On the other, the trend infringes on a very important and traditional
> educational right.
> If I continue to purchase home-use-only videos from PBS, as I mostly do now,
> will I consider that short-sighted a few years down the road?
> Thanks for your input.
> Patty
> _________________________________
> Patricia Hornbeck
> Middlebury College
> Sunderland Language Center
> Middlebury, VT 05753
> 
> (802)443-2268 phone
> (802)443-2075 fax
> Email: Hornbeck@middlebury.edu
> 
>