You don't need any special rights to rent out physical copies of movies. Video stores, Netflix, Redbox all could just buy disks and tapes from the local market and rent them out directly. Sure, they can make a business deal to get better pricing and cut out the middleman, but this effectively puts a cap on that negotiation because the local market is always a fallback. When streaming deals fail there is no fallback, see Netflix's depleting catalog.

The problem is that the experience of watching a movie at home only shifted a little bit during the transition from physical to streaming, while the legal and licensing framework between the two are so different they are hardly comparable. Copyright holders took great advantage of the change to a new format allowing them to redefine the meaning of licensing so that they have more control and can extract more value.

Here's a story about Redbox employees buying DVDs from Walmart to stock kiosks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/redbox-employee-buys-100-dvd...

It seems like a wink-wink, hush-hush deal struck between Redbox employees and certain Walmart brick and mortar employees. I would venture as far as assuming that the three-copy-per-person limit was am arbitrary decision by another brick and mortar employee -- policies like these usually come from subjective decisions by well-meaning but uninformed managers in the retail world.

There's a similar scenario where the last Blockbuster Video in Bend, Oregon restocks its DVDs by buying at Walmart, but it's detailed in one of the documentary videos about it that the manager of said Blcokbuster has a special off-the-record arrangement with Walmart management.

I only mentioned it as a signal that Redbox was apparently unable to get a better deal with whoever licenses/sells the DVDs wholesale than from Walmart, even if they got a special deal from those particular Walmart stores.

I don't know about the US, but here in France they do need special rights.

From what I understand, the first sale doctrine protects them in the US

That is true, and established now, but in the early days of VHS rental, it wasn't so clearly established, and the movie studios did issue high-cost tapes that came with public performance rights.

Even now, any film display outside of the home still requires a public performance license, the studios have just decided to put their efforts into enforcement on the location and business side, rather than the supply/sales side.

>...That is true, and established now, but in the early days of VHS rental, it wasn't so clearly established, and the movie studios did issue high-cost tapes that came with public performance rights.

I don't think that is right. The first sale right is a limitation of the copyright holder's distribution right. This right was first recognized by the Supreme Court in 1908 and was clearly established by the time of video rentals. Video tapes were initially priced very high as the studios were selling to the rental stores, but eventually the studios simply found they could make more money selling copies to individuals and the prices came down.