Can Blockbuster be Sued Over Facebook/Beacon?

An anonymous reader writes "A professor at the New York Law School is arguing that Blockbuster violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 when movie choices that Facebook members made on its Web site were made available to other members of the social network via Beacon. The law basically prohibits video rental outfits from disclosing rental choice of their customers to anyone else without specific written consent. Facebook's legal liability in all of this is unclear; with Blockbuster it's a straightforward case of not complying with the VPPA, the law professor says."

Comments

Maybe I'm wrong?

[navygeek]

I don't use Facebook, so I could be wrong about what choices are being posted, collected, then distributed, but it sounded to me like the 'choices' weren't necessarily rentals, but favorite/preferred/liked movies. If that's the case, Blockbuster wasn't distributing rental information. Also, as another poster pointed out, aren't the users of Facebook putting this information out there freely and willfully anyhow?

Re:is this

[CastrTroy]

Am I the only one who actually likes the business model that BlockBuster has over Netflix? I like going down to the rental store, and getting the movie that I want. I had Zip.ca for a while, and I didn't like that I had to watch whatever they chose to send me. I also didn't like that sometimes movies didn't show up in my locked mail box (I'm in an apartment building), and I would lose a slot for many days while they tried to resolve the issue.