Are screener VHS tapes still illegal?

[Congood23]

Time for a hotly debated question. I apologize if it is warez, and you can warn me if it is and I will take the post down immediately.

But I'm just curious. Since VHS is long a thing of the past, and the movies have long been out, is buying and selling screener tapes from places like eBay still illegal? Or have the companies relinquished ownership of them?

[lordsmurf]

"illegal" is the wrong word. It was never illegal. This was civil.

Most of those companies don't even exist anymore. For example, Buena Vista was a part of Disney, that was later absorbed elsewhere within Disney. The implicit contracts that came with the tapes referred to Buena Vista. Legalese can be obtuse, and those rights didn't necessarily transfer, and may have even been lost.

I had a lot of screeners in the late 90s, because of my job. Most came with paragraph-length contracts that stated the studio could recall the tape, but almost none ever did. For starters, the onus of return shipping would have been on them. So what is the statute of limitations on such a contract? It cannot be "forever". It must be considered abandoned.

Or abandoned simply because nobody cares about archaic VHS tapes licenses in the 2020s.

Put it this way: Heritage Auctions has had screeners on the auction block before.

eBay is a private company with lots of stupid rules. No idea if they still block the sale of screeners.

[VWestlife]

Not any more illegal than selling promo copies of records, which people and record stores do all the time.