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Can I Lend DVDs?
tramm asks: "I just -purchased- a DVD from Hastings that has some rather
ominous wording on the license 'agreement': ANY UNATHORIZED COPYING, HIRING, LENDING OR PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF THIS DVD IS ILLEGAL AND SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTION. What happened to the right of first sale? Can I no longer lend my movies to friends without fearing the MPAA's wrath? Or is this another overstepping of consumers' rights that will become more routine once UCITA becomes 'the law'?" And people wonder why I don't have a DVD player. Now I can point to a reason why, although I'm excited about the technology, I just can't get too thrilled about my rights to use it.
If we take away the ability for artists to profit from their work will that be good? Should we not rather respect their right to charge for their product? Of course technology makes it simple to copy and distribute these works, but that doesn't make it right.
What if Stephen Spielberg had to mow lawns to make a living because everyone circumvented paying him to enjoy his work? (A stretch, but you know what I mean).
Anyway...
Books have been around for few centuries now, and are fairly "traditional". No publisher is going to loose sleep over if you lend a book to your friend/brother/dog, it's (IMHO & IANAL) "fair use". Corporates are just becoming more greedy every day, they use legal imtimidation to scare people (FUD tactics). Lend it to your friend and don't loose sleep over some laywer who have to prove it's existance and 60.000USD salary to write crap like that...
J.
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
Actually, VHS tapes have the same warning, as do laser discs, and video CDs. The idea is to disallow block buster like places from renting the movies without paying royalties. Not to keep you from loaning you DVD to a friend.
For the privilage of being forbiden from loaning you DVDs, you'd have to by a DivX machine. Oh wait, you can't.
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
Actually, now that I think about it, they might think twice if they start getting calls asking for authorization to lend your DVDs...
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Taking things to the logical extreme, could inviting a group of friends over to watch movies be construed as "lending"? The rational-thinker side of me knows it's ludicrous, but to the paranoid-consiracy-theorist side of me, it makes a weird kind of sense. What if you had to give a cut to the MPAA in order to watch movies at home? It gives a new meaning to "home theater"...
Actually, I hadn't heard about this before looking at this link. It is an interesting situation, but I still tend to disagree with the writer's conclusions.
In fact, I think ASCAP is poorly conceived, in and of iteself. As far as I'm concerned (and I spent a few years as a local musician myself, writing and playing original compositions) - artists should cease trying to collect royalties on public performances of their works.
If a piece of music is performed by someone other than the original composer, it is *not* the same experience for the listener. It might be a good imitation, but it's still different. Anyone publically re-creating someone else's musical work had to go to considerable effort to do so. (Had to learn how to play the music, or at least set up the entire performance -- bringing the needed equipment to perform it, advertise it, etc.)
If anything, ASCAP should limit themselves to only collecting royalties from commercial entities that replay artists' recordings for commercial gain (such as radio stations).
Live performances should be left completely out of the picture. Otherwise, you run into this ludicrous situations like the Girl Scouts.
Try visiting http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl
-jerdenn
But as far as lending DVDs is concerned, I say go ahead. There's nothing morally wrong with it any way you look at it, and even though the MPAA might want this to be illegal, doesn't mean it should be. In the ideal world, all copyrighted material should be treated like books. And even if they do pass some inane law making lending illegal, how will they ever find out? They won't. They won't ever find out, you're not doing anything wrong, so I say knock yourself out.
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
i've been posting on slashdot for many months now, and i've never meta-moderated. is there something i'm missing here? i've moderated many times, but am i doing something wrong?
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
I may be showing my ignorance here, but what's the right of First Sale that was mentioned in the story above?
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Maybe you don't mind living in (luckily a fictional, but only mildly so) Orwellian world where every aspect of your life is subject to some sort of EULA, but I do.
You can't just blindly think that people will give up the simple freedom of being able to loan a friend a book or a DVD or a CD. And you can't expect all of humanity to start wearing one bracelet on their right hand that says "WWMD" (What Would the MPAA Do?), and one on their left hand for "WWRD" (What Would the RIAA Do?).
Humanity will always over-rule "legality" when they collide. When that stops being the case, run, run like the wind!
No, it means that if you're in the US, "the book is yours do with it as you wish" and, if you are in the UK, "the book is ours mothah fsckah, we're just loaning it to you, don't spill stuff on it or you are dead!".
The same message also appears when you buy a movie on VHS or VCD. And for as far as I can remember, it always has.
Thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that the additional cost was all there was. There could very well be an additional license that the rental joint needs in order to charge for the rental that could even cost them a per copy fee.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Can I watch a DVD with a friend present?
Technically, YOU are the one who has paid for the DVD, and you've bought a non-exclusive right to view the contents as many times as you wish. This means that you and you alone are allowed to watch it.
Or it would if the industry were able to enforce such a practice. In reality, they just can't do that. The best they can do is to try to ban you from letting too many other people from seeing it, throught the text you quote. It says "lending" is illegal, but what is lending?
If I lend you the DVD and let you watch it in your own home, then yes, that's lending. If I lend you the DVD to watch in *my* home while I'm off doing something else (maybe you don't have a DVD player), it *that* lending? Possibly.
And so on. I think the last word is that they would have a pretty hard time proving you'd lent it to anyone, and that particular word "lending" is just a scare tactic.
Of course if that friend then copied it using DivX (or however it's capitalised) you'd have a very different kettle of fish altogether....
--
Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
"lending" a DVD out for $20 is RENTING (or Hiring, as the federal warning states). lending ONLY refers to the free exchange. and as far as i know, the warning at the beginning of the DVDs is the same as the one before VHS movies, as it is the Federal copyright warning.
Okay, assume for a minute that I can loan a DVD movie out to a friend or whomever I chose (with no monies in exchange). But what happens if I wanted to give it to someone? I try not to break the law nor stretch legalities, so I'm trying to understand this. (DVD is coming full force, and seems to be more restrictive than a regular VHS tape.)
I can, under the old "BetaMax" decision, record a show for my own personal use from the TV, and watch that. I can even have someone else watch it with me, and I'm not breaking the law. I can even give that tape to someone, they can watch it at their house, and I'm still not breaking the law. Whether the show comes from basic UHF/VHF signals or Showtime and HBO... It's all legal, as long as no monies are exchanged for the usage of that tape...
And now comes DVD...
If I go out and buy a DVD, get bored with it, and then give it to my friend who REALLY likes the movie, have I just done something illegal? (The conversation "Oh, can I have that?" "Sure, take it." ocurs with me in my life a lot.)
I'm not trying to be stupid, I'm just trying to make sure that if someone comes knocking at my door, it's not law enforcement with an arrest warrant...
Seth Anderson BTW, I'm not 23 anymore -- I am TexasCowboy26 now. =)
This is lending in the legal sense as in "rent or lease" ... it doesn't mean giving it to a buddy to watch on Saturday night. If you charge a fee for people to view or borrow the movie, you will be required to pay royaltys to the film's studio. Things are a bit fuzzy here as well because you also owe royaltys if you want to do a public or large-party showing of a film. You must rent a special copy for public showing that usually costs between 50 and 1000 dollars each time you show it.
Right of first sale that people are talking about is your right to resell the copy; however whoever you sell it to is still bound by the restrictions on public showing and lending.
~GoRK
I've seen similar statements, without the disclaimer for the USA, in other books published in the UK. As I understand it, there is no "First Sale Doctrine" in the UK.
I'm not quite sure what the legal meaning of the statement is supposed to be. Lending libraries in Europe appear to be treated differently by copyright law.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The Orem (Utah) Public Library lends DVDs to anyone with a card -- free. A few of the local video stores rent them. Obviously, lending is OK under some circumstances.
Weston
Tweet, tweet.
It seems to be restricting unauthorized lending. I'm not sure exactly that means ANY lending at all. I could lend the DVD out to people for $20 and that would indeed probably be illegal. However I'm not sure this restricts just lending it to a friend for free for a night or something. From the short lines of the text that we have here this doesn't sound much different than the rules that have been applied to VHS for ages.
Currently, DVD is primarily priced at sell-through prices--MSRP goes from $14.99 to about $34.99 at most. When Blockbuster or your local video chain buys dozens of copies in bulk and rents them to consumers, the studios are losing out on getting a cut of that profit. This is why we can expect rental pricing for DVDs to come into effect some time in the future.
As far as what does make it legal for you to buy a title and then rent it out, I am not sure. However, it is more than just the initial pricing from the studio. You can buy a copy of The Sixth Sense on VHS from 800.com, but it's going to cost you $89.95. And while that's the same price Blockbuster pays for the same tape, paying the premium price still won't give you the right to rent it out for a fee. It doesn't matter whether you're paying the rental price or the $21.95 sell-through for the DVD.
Does anyone have an idea of what makes it legal for a rental outlet to charge you for the right to borrow a tape?
---
What I should have said was nothing.
The first rule of dvd club is ...
For those who are interested in the campfire songs thing Here's a link
The VCR tapes that you rent at the local video store often cost the store much more than the ones that they can sell to customers. Typically, the studios initially make tapes available to rental shops at a much higher price per copy and then later sell them to consumers at a lower rate.
There are exceptions where the studios want to get a whole lot of copies of a popular movie out, so all the copies are sold cheaply, but for limited interest releases (I had to wait 6 weeks after _The Truth About Cats and Dogs_ came out for rental before I could actually buy a copy as a present for my wife who, inexplicably, really liked the movie), the two stage release schedule is common.
The bottom line is, you can loan it to your friends and family, but you can't rent it for a fee. You would have to contract with the distributor and pay the higher for rent cost if you had the intention of renting them out.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Of course you can lend the DVD, because the MPAA is not going to go after the grass-roots level consumer. Legality, whatever it actually is, gives way to reality. They know where their bread is buttered, and they certainly do not want to injure the guy who does buy the actual DVD.
Of course your friend who borrows it will be sued mercilessly, and will have a special "Region Code" tatooed on his ass as a punishment.
-L