Long-time porn watchers well remember the mid-‘80s Swedish Erotica series: Multiple volumes of loops released in a one-hour format, definitely not shot in Sweden, but populated with some of America’s top early porn stars: Abigail Clayton, Juliet Anderson, Seka, Candida Royalle, John Holmes, Linda Wong, Paul Thomas, Cris Cassidy, Candie Evens and dozens more. But who owns the rights to that footage?
“A company called Sunshine [Films] is distributing a line of movies called Swedish Erotica, for which they do not have a copyright,” charges attorney Stanley Stone. “My client, Caballero [Home Video], has the copyright. The copyright was taken out in the late 1980s; I think it was around ’86 or ’87.”
But wait: Didn’t Odyssey Group Video manufacture Swedish Erotica volumes at least into the early ‘90s? Did they own the right to do so?
“Here is the answer,” Stone replies. “There is a copyright which was taken out by Odyssey. However, that copyright is for compilations only, and the copyright is limited to the words ‘copyright.’ The substance of the compilations are not copyrighted; they belong to my client. What is copyrighted by Odyssey is just the words ‘Odyssey’ and ‘compilation.’ That’s all.”
Confusing? Just a bit – but it gets worse, when one traces the history of both Caballero, which was sold by partners Al Bloom and Howie Klein to Danny Momane in ’93, and Odyssey Group, which went bankrupt a decade later and whose assets were bought by Sunshine for $275,000.
“Al Bloom sold the rights to Swedish Erotica Hard; we could put them out with hardcore covers because Al would not do a hardcore cover,” recollects Bob East, former Sales Manager for Odyssey Group. “He sold the rights to [then-Odyssey owner] Bob Tremont, pure and simple, when Caballero was having trouble under Al Bloom. [Sunshine] bought them when they bought the bankruptcy of Odyssey. Odyssey owned them, and therefore, [Sunshine] got them when they got the rest of Odyssey, as long as they put them out with a hardcore cover. We called them ‘Swedish Erotica Hard’ when we put them out. We put two on a tape, which gave us two hours of tape; we put out 36 volumes.”
And has Sunshine fulfilled the deal by using hardcore covers?
“He [Sunshine owner Josef Shemesh] and I spoke and I told him that they had to be with the hard covers,” East says. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s definitely how I want to go and use the same kind of cover,’ so I assume that’s what he’s doing. He’s just probably putting them on DVD, because they’ve never been.”
Matter settled, right? Well, maybe not.
“We licensed a two-hour version to Odyssey, Swedish Erotica Hard, with hard boxes,” recalls Bloom, “and they used our chromes to make the hard boxes. But that’s long-ago expired, and it was a royalty deal anyway. I believe there was a term to it, and it was probably five years, because I always did my agreements for five years. That’s number one, and number two, it was a royalty deal and they [Odyssey] stopped paying royalties long ago.”
So the rights should not have been sold with Odyssey’s assets?
“Absolutely not,” Bloom insists. “It wasn’t an [Odyssey] asset; it was a Caballero asset; it’s not their asset. It’s a trademark that was owned by Caballero. The Swedish Erotica volumes were all trademarked to Caballero. We didn’t sell the rights; we licensed them to use it in a particular format and get royalties based on use. We never gave up the rights. We didn’t want to sell it with hard boxes; they wanted to, so we let them do it and we were getting a royalty for it, simple as that. When they stopped paying us royalties, as far as I’m concerned, they lost the rights.”
“We had those masters deposited over at VCA,” Bloom continues. “VCA was doing the duplicating on that. If someone got a hold of masters from VCA, that was an illegal transfer.”
Of course, the dispute could possibly be settled by looking at the contract between Caballero and Odyssey.
“Oh, good Lord – there may have been a written agreement; I honest to God don’t remember,” Bloom admits. “And it’s not something I would have taken with me. It would have gone with Danny [Momane] when they moved out of that building, and from what I understand, most of that stuff, they left behind, and when Mark Carriere took the building back, they threw all that stuff away. But to the best of my recollection, if there was an agreement, it was a one or a two-pager. I would have drawn it up.”
For Sunshine, the matter is simple – the Swedish Erotica titles in question were part of an estimated 1,500 titles they bought during OGV’s bankruptcy proceedings.
“If the court sells you this, it means it you own it. We didn’t buy it from someone on the street, we bought it from the court,” a source within Sunshine that was familiar with the deal told AVN.com.
“I went to my lawyer and he said, ‘You have all the titles, its right there on the paper – that’s it,’” the same source said. “What more can you do? “
Sunshine claims that they heard from Caballero’s lawyer four months ago – explained their position to him, and assumed the matter had been dropped as they have heard nothing from the lawyer since.
Sunshine provided AVN.com with a copy of the bankruptcy court’s order approving the sale of the OGV catalog to Sunshine Films. Included on the court document’s Exhibit A, the complete list of video masters sold to Sunshine via the arrangement, are the Swedish Erotica titles in question.
