Yes, you absolutely could do that legally - it is part of the "right of first sale", however you would have to wait until the videos were available for sale at Walmart. If a video rental store wanted to have access to videos before they were available for home purchase (and most of them did) then they had to make deals with the rights holders and follow the contracts that went along with them.

As far as I'm aware, this is not true. The first-sale doctrine allowed the rental of VHS and video games bought normally at retail stores. The movie and video game industry went ballistic over this, a Nintendo executive called it "commercial rape". The movie industry took it to court and lost, and tried lobbying congress to no avail.

IIRC, they then hatched a scheme where the retail availability of new movies on VHS would be restricted at least for a time, forcing video rental shops to pay more for copies of popular new movies.

Why would you say this? It is the opposite of the truth; the first-sale doctrine prevents the copyright owner from interfering with you while you rent out your cassettes.

You need to purchase rights to display the video in public. No one can stop you from renting out the tape. You already possess the right to rent out your own property.

You are completely wrong. There's no such thing as "right to rent video." You could 100% buy a bunch of videos and start renting them out today, and it would be completely legal. Netflix does this today for their DVD rental business. This is also why libraries are legal.

You can't buy a DVD and charge tickets to see the DVD played by you. You can't stream the DVD's contents over the Internet. But you can absolutely rent the DVD itself.

The problem isn't that you can't stream the contents to other people. The current legal situation also roughly states that a viewer is allowed to stream the contents of copies they own, but you can't help them. (See also Aereo, where all data was permanently owned by a single user, no resale shenanigans whatsoever.) The law shouldn't work like that. Users should be able to outsource without causing a violation of copyright law.

In the current age of gigabit FTTH connections, I wonder how the situation would be if the service provider would just allow you to rent a dvd drive in a datacenter that's connected via regular sata, just tunneled through the internet.

That'd avoid all the "breaking the DRM", "modifying the data", etc.

As provider you just offer a device that loads dvds from a user's in-datacenter storage cabinet into their in-datacenter dvd drives, and rent them a dvd drive.

That might be complicated enough to avoid the whole "performance" interpretation

Another comment [0] pointed out that a version of this was already tried, and it was found to still be a public performance. Not sure how much the details of the technologies used would affect the ruling, but probably not enough.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645286

> Not sure how much the details of the technologies used would affect the ruling, but probably not enough

Right. Aereo notwithstanding, one way around this might be to set it up like MP3Tunes[1] where you're a specialized digital locker service. The "fixed" "tangible medium" should originate with the customer, and a transfer from the customer-controlled copy to the business should be involved (rather than the other way around). With a large enough physical presence, you could get this down to pizza delivery time frames and/or Redbox levels of friction.

1. contrast with mp3.com

That's just Aereo again.

> There's no such thing as "right to rent video."

There is, strictly speaking—it's part of the exclusive rights that Title 17 lays out for copyright owners[1]. It's just that (a) it forces you to be in the business of doing the rentals yourself (you don't get to just point at someone with an interest doing rentals and dictate terms to them, sans contract), and (b) even if you're doing your own rentals, if you're also selling copies, then there's nothing stopping someone from doing an end-run around your rental business by just buying a copy from you and doing things their way with that copy.

(Granted, this doesn't make the person you were replying to any more correct about what they meant when they said you couldn't do this.)

1. "distribute copies [...] by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending"

When publishing an ebook, you set a different price (usually a multiple) for libraries.

That's exactly what companies like RedBox do/did. They would send buyers out to Walmarts and Best buys all over the country to buy up copies.

I think they eventually stopped doing it just to appease the production companies and avoid their frivolous lawsuits.

I was just going to mention RedBox!

If I remember correctly, they tried to buy from the company - Disney IIRC - but they were refused sale. Instead, they simply bought retail and rented those.