Hi, I'm Travis Corcoran, founder and president of Technical Video Rental.
I'd like to address a few issues, and reassure folks here that we're not ripping off Rudy's estate ... or anyone else.
The assertions that have been brought up here include:
- we have illegal copies in our inventory
- it is illegal to rent out videos without paying royalties
- we purchased "just one copy" of some videos from cbbaga.ca, and then did something unethical
Addressing these in order:
We do not have a single illegal copy of any video anywhere in our inventory. We've communicated with dozens and dozens of vendors and reassured them of that, and also told them that if they ever want to do an audit of our inventory for illegal copies, we'd be happy to help. We've got over a dozen 3" binders filled with receipts for every purchase we've ever made, and we can document the legal origin of every one of the tens of thousands of DVDs in our inventory. I take copyright violations very seriously, and would NEVER engage in such activity.
As some others have pointed out on related threads in the metalworking usenet group, it is perfectly legal to rent out videos, assuming that they were legally purchased. This is called the under the "First Sale Doctrine", and it has been part of the law for a century. TVR consulted with a lawyer before going into business, and we are a member in good standing of the VSDA - an association of video rental stores. Glenn Ashmore points out that Blockbuster pays a royalty to the studios. This is not exactly correct. As a business decision, Blockbuster decided to negotiate a deal with a few studios, so that instead of buying copies of videos outright (the way that Technical Video Rental and most other video rental stores do), they instead get free copies from the studios and then pay them a small fee for each rental. This is *not* a royalty scheme.
I'd also like to address one particular commenter directly. Adam Smith tells a distressing tale of how Technical Video Rental purchased one copy of his mother's video, and then illegally pirated it.
The truth is quite different.
TVR purchased
3 copies of Bookbinding Intro course 2 copies of Bookbinding Intermediate course 1 copy of Bookbinding Advanced Course 2 copies of Endpapers 3 copies of Bookbinding with Leather 1 copy of Restoration and Repairas well as other titles.
...thus putting thousands of dollars in the hands of the original vendor.
We have the receipts to document this.
To give an example of our good faith dealings, I'll also point out that we contacted the vendor (cbbag.ca) regarding the fact that their DVD prices were $125 higher than their VHS prices (which the website said was because of high DVD duplication costs), and helpfully suggested some DVD duplicating services that they might have good luck with.
At some point the vendor decided that they wished to prevent would-be bookbinders from having access to videos except through themselves, and they then silently stopped filling orders from TVR.
Since that time we have not added any additional copies of videos from cbbag.ca to our inventory.
We at Technical Video Rental are quite proud with the good relations we have with the vast majority of our vendors, and we're proud of the fact that we make high quality video training much more widely available to the folks who seek it out.
And, by the way, I'm not just some suit running a company. I'm a hobbyist woodturner, I've taken a turning class at the North Bennet Street school, I've got a Powermatic lathe in my woodshop, and one of the reasons I started TVR was so that I could get view a lot of woodturning videos that interested me ( such as...
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me,
Travis J I Corcoran, President Technical Video Rental, Inc.