J films on video w/ E subtitles

[wlt4@mindspring.com]

> He was saying that
> technically universities 
> shouldn't be able to buy VHS tapes either!
> According to him, it was all a 
> question of rights. DVDs and videos are sold
> for home use only, and to 
> buy them for public use in a library involves
> other rights. 

I don't know anything about Japanese copyright law but if this was somebody in
the US it would be clear that this person doesn't understand public
performance rights.  These rights (which as you might guess cover a showing of
the video in public, ie beyond family/friends) are indeed not granted with
DVDs/video.  That's what "home use" refers to.  However, it's quite
clear--again in the US at least--that libraries are not restricted from
purchasing, owning and making these videos available to their patrons, though
not for any public use.  So a library could buy the Criterion DVD of, say,
Rashomon and lend this to its users.  However the library could not set up a
monitor and have a public screening of the DVD and it also could not lend the
disc to anybody they knew was planning to use it for a similar public use.  

And as for the producers' permissions, these performance rights are granted by
the copyright holders which may or may not be the producers.  In some cases
you might have to get approval from all producers; in others you could legally
show it even if the producers explicitly denied permission as long as they
don't control any of the copyright.

LT