I once bought lots of DVDs and have collected a few hundred of them over the years. Now I watch everything online. Many are classic movies from the past, as well as well-known box office blockbusters. I could dump them at Good Will or the Salvation Army, but I would rather donate them where they will watch and appreciate them. I was thinking of local schools, but I don’t think they need or want them, and many wouldn’t be appropriate for kids. Any better ideas?
Hospice care/retirement home/assisted care, etc.
Hospitals or prisons come to mind.
How about your local library?
All good ideas. Thanks. We have a local hospice/assisted care center and a local library. I can check them out. Perhaps the hospital would want them.
For donation, yeah, your local library. But if you or anybody you know hosts an Airbnb, the more DVDs on location the better.
I may be wrong but my understanding is that if you donate material like this to an institution like a library, hospital, or prison, they cannot put it into their collection. They will have to resell it for funding.
Back when I was working in a prison, we did not rent movies off the shelf from a regular video store. Video store rentals were based on the premise that the video was only going to be watched by a handful of people. An institution (like a prison) would be showing the movie to hundreds of people. So we had to pay a higher institutional rate to rent a movie.
I also remember that I once rented a movie from a video store and lost it. So I had to replace it. I had to pay a higher price than the movie was selling for in stores. When I questioned this, I was told that video stores had to pay a higher price for the movies they purchased because their copies of the movie would be seen by more people than a home viewer copy.
I once talked with a librarian who told me something similar. Libraries don’t buy books from a regular bookstore. They purchase books through special contracts based on the premise that the books will be loaned out and read by many more people than a regular book. So libraries can’t accept regular books to put in their collections.
All of this is admittedly anecdotal and things may have changed since I heard these things. But it’s something you should check on if you’re making a donation.
It is possible that some libraries or prisons have made agreements with book/movie publishers where they are precluded from sourcing their books/movies wherever they want but there is nothing in US law that requires this.
It is a common misconception that you need a special “rental” license for copyrighted materials, but it’s not true. Libraries and video rental stores certainly can just go buy a book or DVD off the shelf and then loan it out unless they’ve made some contractual agreement with a publisher not to do so.
If you show a movie to a large group (as a prison might do for movie night),
you do indeed need a “public performance” license, but that wouldn’t apply if they had a DVD lending library that inmates could check DVDs out from for personal viewing (not sure if any US prisons have such a thing, but if they did, it wouldn’t require any special license).
Pre-DVDs, the way that video sales worked is that there would be a period of a few months where VHS tapes were sold for ~$100 each. This was “rental” pricing, and it was a way for movie studios to effectively get some of the lucrative rental market. Demand would be very high early on, so rental stores could make back those costs by renting the tape for ~$1-3/night. Then after a while the studios would lower the price to encourage the public to purchase tapes for their home libraries. But, again, none of this was ever required by law. The rental shops may have had contracts with movie studios to only buy the “rental” priced videos (and thus get access to them), or even if not, they probably put in their contract with the renter that if you lost their tapes, you had to pay their cost for it, which would have been $100 or so.
When DVDs came out, the studios largely abandoned rental pricing since they realized that it was better to sell a lot of $20 DVDs to individuals than a few $100 VHS tapes to rental stores.
But nothing in the law that said you couldn’t just start up your own movie rental business and wander over to Walmart and pick up some DVDs for $10 and rent them out.
I agree that you should check with the institution in question, as they may have contractual obligations that prevent them from doing this.
Good points. Thanks. I will check with them before donating.
On the video rental store topic: when a hot movie was first released to video (at least back in the VHS days), the price was jacked up for a while because the sellers knew the video stores would have to stock the movie due to high demand. Then the price would drop. (eta: Ninjaed on this by iamthewalrus)
I had not heard about libraries not accepting regular books; we frequently donate (or donatED, back when we still bought a lot of dead tree editions) books. While some were certainly resold, I never got the impression that this was the only disposition for them. Ebooks - while not something you can exactly donate - do have different handling requirements (and frankly, the publishers are being jerks about it).
The suggestion of AirBnB is not a bad one - if you happen to be staying at one at some point, bring a long a handful of favorites and leave them there if the place has a DVD player. I’ve never done that specifically. but I usually try to leave behind a couple of nonperishable grocery items (extra sodas or whatever), as it seems other visitors often do.
I was a librarian for 30 years (in three different university libraries) and we put donated books into the collection all the time. Not all of them, of course; many donated materials were outdated or out-of-scope for the collections, and would end up in the library book sale.
It’s true that most library purchasing is done through dealers that cater to the library market, but we could buy books wherever we wanted, including local bookstores and even Amazon. However, most libraries are public entities, and some jurisdictions have peculiar rules about purchasing; that might have been what your friend was talking about. That was never the case where I worked, though.
I found a local hospice/long-term care center that said they would love to have them. I also called my local library but they said they didn’t accept donated DVDs because they may not be approved by the Library Board and didn’t want the hassle of dealing with that. Since the long-term care center will take them that’s where they’ll go!
Terrific! I’m sure the clients will enjoy watching them.
Hospice care is an excellent resolution for this.
For anyone else following along there are options to resell your collections online.
My wife and I went through this several months ago and got rid of about 2/3 of our collection for some extra cash.
And yet they exist. I’ve had a few Netflix discs where the Extras on the menu are blocked, showing a notice you need to buy your own copy instead. Others offer no Extras at all but I would not know if purchase-discs are the same.
The local theater chain here has Tuesday Night Classics where there’s one showing at 7pm of a not-current movie for $5. At least some of these are using a Blu-Ray disc – most notably Ben-Hur a few weeks ago. I’m thinking there is not enough demand to go to the expense of digitizing the movie as current releases are and, while there are probably 35mm prints available, the theater converted everything to digital years ago.
Whether they are paying a public performance fee or doing it on the down-low I have no idea.
Netflix definitely has deals with all the movie publishers to get lower-cost discs and pay back a share of the rental profits. But they didn’t always. And it’s a good thing that they aren’t required, or we wouldn’t have a Netflix at all!