Question about DVDs and Music Rights

[jeremy223]

Lately I have been searching for unedited versions of episodes where songs have been removed or replaced due to rights issues. I have collected all the vhs tapes that Columbia House released. White Line Warriors does contain the Prince song on these tapes. However, I am now wondering if the song is intact on the Columbia House dvds which I am now collecting.Does anyone have this volume on dvd and can let me know?

The reason I ask is this. In the A-team pilot, the song Jumpin Jack Flash is cut from the season 1 boxset. It is intact on the Columbia House vhs, but not on the Columbia House dvd volume which was released 3 years later. I always thought the vhs and dvds from Columbia were the same, but apparently the song issue only came up within the 3 years between the vhs and dvd release. Knight Rider may have been affected as well and I don't want to track down the Columbia House dvds if they are edited like the season sets.

[Lost Knight]

I think it's an issue of the timing of when the original music licenses/contracts were made and written, and what home video formats existed at that time, which included VHS or Beta tapes. Formats such as DVD and Blu-ray, let alone digital downloads, certainly were not envisioned at the time when these older shows existed.

As it stands, obtaining music licenses is evidently very expensive for the newer formats of home video, and in a lot of cases is probably usually not worth the cost when trying to make a profit. Interestingly, video streaming seems to be able to sidestep this issue as I have watched other shows with omitted DVD music like Quantum Leap, fully intact. Apparently it's not considered home video because it isn't privately owned.

[jeremy223]

Lost Knight, you are probably right. It is likely that rights have to be secured for each type of format that episodes are released in. In that case, I don't have a lot of hope for the Columbia House dvds being unedited. Just hoping someone has the White Line Warriors dvd that CH released and can confirm if Little Red Corvette is there or not.

Which streaming service do you use? Is it Netflix or Amazon or something?

[Lost Knight]

I don't have a lot of hope for the Columbia House DVDs to be unedited either, but at the same time I never heard anything about omitted music when they were released. That could be due to low popularity at the time, though. Personally I use Netflix, but it may not be for much longer because I'm not impressed with what's available for streaming and they have too many obscure titles I've never heard of.

If you're a stickler for having the original episodes intact (which I can understand), you can always burn the VHS copy to DVD with a VHS-DVD recorder. The only compromise would be picture quality. Although I've never seen the Columbia House DVDs to compare, I'm not sure their picture quality stands up to Universal Studios' transfers anyway. Nevertheless, if you're able to enjoy these on VHS, it sounds like you care more about intact episodes than you do about picture quality.