selling movie cells

[khakismum]

What is the name of your state?What is the name of your state? Georgia

By a stroke of pure luck, I happend across a huge pile of old movie reels. I found reels from many, many classic movies. Sadly the vast majority of the reels are damaged or in the process on degredation or the movies were incomplete - read, they cannot be shown for "viewing pleasure". What I was thinking of would be to cut up the film into 3"-8" sections of film and sell the cells as "collectors items". My question is, "Can I?" I know the film is copyrighted but since I am not going to play/show the movies, just sell little bits of it as novelties/collectables does it still fall under the copyright restrictions?

Guess I'd just like to know if I just found a pile of junk or a potential business. Thanks!

 

[divgradcurl]

My question is, "Can I?" I know the film is copyrighted but since I am not going to play/show the movies, just sell little bits of it as novelties/collectables does it still fall under the copyright restrictions?

This would probably be infringing. In Greenwich Workshop v. Timber Creations, 932 F.Supp. 1210 (1996), the court held that removing "plates" from a book of photographs purchased by the defendants and then mounting the plates in a frame and reselling them was a derivative work:

"Applying the foregoing standards to the facts of this case, the Court rules that defendants' matted and framed bookplates do infringe plaintiff's copyrights in both the artwork and the book. "By borrowing and mounting the preexisting, copyrighted individual art images without the consent of [plaintiff] ... [defendants] ha[ve] prepared a derivative work and infringed the subject copyrights." Mirage Editions, Inc. v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341, 1343 (9th Cir.1988) (affirming district court's holding that defendant created "derivative works" that infringed plaintiffs' copyrights when defendant transferred artworks from a commemorative book to individual tiles for sale to the public). Defendants' infringement is particularly evident in the context of the copyrighted book, which defendants have clearly "recast" and "transformed" by physically removing the pages and adapting them into works of art to hang on the wall."

Now, there may be later caselaw that disputes this, but this is a 1996 case, so it is reasonably recent, and in my brief searching I was not able to find anything newer that came up with something different.