Why is renting (leasing) a car legal?

They should put a stop to that.

And there is this thing called a "library" where you can take books home with you to read later, I mean how wierd is that and should it even be legal?

Think about it, the sales of new books will really be hurting from this.

I'm pretty positive the game companies get a cut of the profits. I know movie studios get rental profits.

Nintendo vs Blockbuster Entertainment (1987)

Nintendo took legal action against Blockbuster for renting out NES games. Nintendo lost.

Being sore losers they, then, accused Blockbuster of copyright infringement because they rented out the games with photocopies of the instruction manuals. They won that case.

Small victories, I guess.

The book Game Over goes into greater detail about this and many other Nintendo cases. Some more petty than the others.

Well a car is used to drive arround and it gets used after a while... i don't think it can be compared with items of intelectual property that don't suffer use in the same way...
But your point about libraries is good, it's the exact same thing.
If you had a great library 2 feet from your house would you still buy books?

The whole idea of renting media (book, movie, games, software, music) is flawed in my opinion....but what I was wondering here was about the legality of the action, for which some of you gave detailed answers, thanks.

The idea that you can go to a place and read all the books that you want to read for free or for very little money is one of the greatest ideas that mankind ever had.

And I think that timed digital dowloading can replace the traditional renting of games.

You pay a small sum of money and you can then download the whole game but just for a set period of time, say 24 hours before it deletes itself or it becomes unplayable.

Well I don't know about game rentals but shops here typically sell you game A then you can exchange it for game B for a small 6-7 euro fee (+ diffrence in price if B is more expensive)

in older times it was the book that cost money, not the material.
I do agree that the library is a good idea, i just reasoned on rental of games and by extrapolation, yes it seems contrary to the whole idea of copyright to have rental places. It's just a reflexion not my opinion.



My opinion is that artist should be paid for performing in concerts hall or on TV shows and movies should base their revenue on movies and the rights of the TV showings.... but once a song was on the radio or a movie on TV... why is it illegal to share when you could have just as well recorded it (especially when digital VCRs do it for you now) Nobody frowned before the digital age if you didn't make a profit of it.
Software is entirely different though... Perhaps as you say digital downloar or OnLive systems will be the future... instead of using a program, you open a window that runs the progam on a server? certainly doable and you could be charged per usage time... (would make professional software affordable to regular people too).

yeah rental and resale is basically the same thing.... the store gets the money.

The idea of copyright was to benefit us the users of the copyrighted work.

It's a trade-off they get a limited (originally it was anyway) monopoly in exchange we get progress in science and the useful arts.

Now we probably don't need it. Thanks to the Internet producing and spreading ideas is cheaper and less risk is involved on the artist/scientists part. (no more supply and demand issues)

I know with movies that they charge rental stores a lot more and then they get a license to do it. Maybe that happens with games.

I think game companies should support rentals. I would bet game sales would decrease with out it, since £40 is a huge investment for something you might not like and trying it for a few days is the best way to decide. Any sane publisher should give the game enough replay value and length that people shouldn't be satisfied with a 5-day rental.