There’s a comic book shop in my neighborhood that sells bootleg Asian and obscure horror movies on video. There is no doubt that they are bootlegs. They take blank tapes and plaster a little handwritten label on the tape itself and use a crappy color scan of the DVD cover and paste it onto the videotape box. Most of them sell for 15 or 20 bucks. I’ve never seen a store be so utterly blatant about it. This isn’t one or two movies, it’s an entire rack. Uh, can’t they get into big, big trouble doing that?
Most comic book stores I’ve been to don’t usually make it so obvious, but I’ve been to more than a few that have a nice bootleg section behind the counter or a catalog.
Of course it’s illegal, but I can’t see the feds breaking down their doors to seize a badly dubbed copy of “Happy Alien Tentacle 9”.
Well, there are a few shops in town here (and I won’t name names because I imagine the file-sharing rule kicks in here) that sell/rent bootleg videos and CD’s. You can rent copies of Star Wars: The Phantom Edit or bootleg concert videos from certain video stores. Bad VHS bootlegs ripped from foreign DVD’s are also popular 'round here as a way of seeing movies not released in America yet.
I’ve also seen and I know record stores that carry live/unreleased bootleg CD’s with varying degrees of blatancy. Some stuff gets put right out on display, other stuff you have to know to ask for. Still, it’s pretty cool in the sense that for the most part this is stuff that you can’t get your hands on through legal means, so at least they’re not taking money from some more legitimate enterprise.
I imagine that the bootleg videos in your comic shop are about the same, right? If there was some legitimate distributor meeting the demand that these people have, they wouldn’t be paying such high prices for low-quality bootlegs. Besides, I imagine bootlegging is almost a standard part of the comic book trade, even if it’s done on a very small scale for trusted customers/friends of the store. The same can be said for video stores, where independent video stores still thrive.
LC
There are guys that appear on campus selling DVDs/VHS tapes of movies that aren’t out yet, so I assume they’re selling boots.