Why is renting games legal?

[richardhutnik]

liquidninja said:

2funky4u said:

liquidninja said:

richardhutnik said:
...So, I feel it would be good to rephrase this question as:
Why SHOULD renting games be legal?...

Copyright law was made to benefit users not creators. Renting benefit's users.

 

Nope, copyright is there to protect the creator and his or her work.

 

Not according to the Suppreme court:

"The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors."

Content is created to benefit the users of the content.  That is why it is created.  Without users, content is just noise.  It is noise of a tree falling in the woods that is not heard. 

Some articles on this:

http://copyright.nhaminated.com/intro/laws.html

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html (see below):

The “copyright bargain”

The copyright system works by providing privileges and thus benefits to publishers and authors; but it does not do this for their sake. Rather, it does this to modify their behavior: to provide an incentive for authors to write more and publish more. In effect, the government spends the public's natural rights, on the public's behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works. Legal scholars call this concept the “copyright bargain.” It is like a government purchase of a highway or an airplane using taxpayer's money, except that the government spends our freedom instead of our money.

But is the bargain as it exists actually a good deal for the public? Many alternative bargains are possible; which one is best? Every issue of copyright policy is part of this question. If we misunderstand the nature of the question, we will tend to decide the issues badly.

The Constitution authorizes granting copyright powers to authors. In practice, authors typically cede them to publishers; it is usually the publishers, not the authors, who exercise these powers and get most of the benefits, though authors may get a small portion. Thus it is usually the publishers that lobby to increase copyright powers. To better reflect the reality of copyright rather than the myth, this article refers to publishers rather than authors as the holders of copyright powers. It also refers to the users of copyrighted works as “readers,” even though using them does not always mean reading, because “the users” is remote and abstract.