I've always flirted with the idea of opening a video rental store. The dream is still just that, a dream. Would it be legal to purchase a dvd, back up the dvd, and rent the back ups in a store? It seems that would be more economical in case the dvds are not returned. It would cut down on theft it seems. I don't know the details of this and I may never open a store. I was just curious if that would be allowed. Thank you for your time.
Out of curiousity, how does rental places such as Netflix do it? As many of the movies I receive appear to be copies.
I don't use Netflix, so I did not know that Ferguj1. Are the discs that appear to be copies copy-protected? I'm not asking you to copy one of them, but maybe load one up and see if there is copy-protection on it.
It's a bit of a grey area.. My take on it is that it is legal as long as the media owners receive the same payment percentage from each rental as they would from the rental of the original disk. So long as the disks are clearly marked as "property of <whatever your business is called> - rental copy" and have some basic copyproofing built in then it's no harm no foul. Obviously you would not be able to sell the disks created as that would be commercial piracy, but as for renting? I would suggest contacting a couple of the big studios.. MGM/Universal etc and get their take on it. On to copy protection. As we all know it's pretty pointless because it has all been cracked. I can see problems for the rental market in the future with this "locked to one piece of hardware" kind of drm proposed for BD films. They would obviously need some method of avoiding this built in feature otherwise the rental market will collapse. Expect to see "rental version" disks without the drm restrictions sometime soon Oddly I was given a lovefilm.com (printed on the disk too.. property of lovefilm.com-rental version) rental disk to copy a few weeks back.. As a coincidence I have the normal retail version here.which I bought a while back from a clearance bin. the copy protection was way tougher on the lovefilm disk. Full arcoss.. 99 titles.. all the BS, whereas the retail version was just the usual bog standard sony junk. hidden buttons, a few invalid menu entries and BOV's... so there does seem to be a difference in the copy protection used on rentals versus retail... didn't stop me ripping it, though my standalone dvd player couldn't actually play the rental disk.. it just returned to the menu every time. Nice example of defective by design
