What's unauthorised renting?

[christaddict]

I do understand unauthorised copying of music/ DVDs, but what is unauthorised renting? How does it make legal to rent DVDs from a library?

 

[Dandelion_Wine]

I’d assume that the library and places like Blockbuster have some sort of permission to ‘rent’ videos.

So I couldn’t just amass a video collection and charge my neighbors to rent them.

Now that I say that out loud, that kinda makes me angry. It’s like they make their money once by selling you the VHS/DVD but God forbid you should make any money unless of course you give them a cut.

Oh well.

I used to hang around a small college and they’d have a movie night where someone would rent a movie and about 10 people would all watch it. Apparently that’s illegal. It’s ok if it’s spontaneous but they couldn’t advertise movie night in the commons.

 

[jc-servant]

Our public library “lends” movies and books, but it does not charge a fee for each use. I think if they charged a fee for the movies it would be “unauthorized rental” unless they had some kind of agreement with the movie distributors like a video store. To be positive on the exact limits, I believe that someone would have to look up the laws relating to movie distribution and use of copyrighted intellectual property which can be a pretty complicated area of law.