Let's Go Back In History

I want you to picture something for me for just one second. Imagine your favorite record store. Now imagine that instead of buying the albums, singles, EP's, etc inside this store you could rent them. You walk in and eye a band you have been meaning for sometime to listen to, say Parliament-Funkadelic, as in "I've been meaning to get some funk for a while," but $17.99 is a little steep. But for $2.99 per week or $3.99 per new release you can borrow it. Pretty cool. Want to know why your favorite record store doesn't rent to you?

"Unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording and in the musical works embodied therein, the owner of a particular phonorecord may not, for purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord by rental, lease, or lending."

The above quotation is taken from the 1984 Amendment to the Copyright Act. It was written and voted into law as a result of about 200 such Record Rental Stores that popped up across America just like Video Stores did at the time. Why the movie industry didn't get such legislation I don't know, but they must have felt rentals were in its best interest. It seems the idea of record rental stores was fairly popular overseas before it met its end domestically. Japan had around 1,700 stores of its own and countries in Western Europe also got into the idea.

The American stores rented to customers at a rate of 99 cents to $2.50 per disc for 1 to 3 nights. Now this was at the dawn of the Compact Disc age when actual "phonograph" records were still widely in existence as was the casette. The demise of the rental store was partially due to the notion that the CD would last for a very long time meaning these stores would never need to re-purchase an album, as they would be certain to do with vinyl and even cassette tape wearing out. This meant that slowly but surely the record business would fade into obscurity. Or at least that was the argument that the companies must have made to Congress. Interestingly it wasn't just the era of the CD that brought an end to one listener's wet dream and a label's greedy nightmare. The stores, to their own detriment, also sold blank tape so customers would have less and less a reason to come into the rental store or any other form of record store.

The reason that Congress had to introduce the above amendment is because of an idea called the First Sale Doctrine which says that a copyright holder in a work has the exclusive right to copy, reproduce, publish, print and vend his work, but puts a limit on the vending part. After the copyright holder sells an individual copy for the first time (to a distributor, chain, whatever) he has no control over the resale of that very item. This allows for used record & book stores, amazon, ebay, etc, etc. So the amendment was executed to maintain the Doctrine of First Sale, but wiping away the right to rent, lend or lease, unless as you may have thought to yourself, the lending is being done by a nonproft library, nonprofit educational institution, or lending for other nonprofit purposes.

Moving forward 22 years, the Internet has obviously become a much less organized version of the record rental store where you do not have to give the product back at the end of the day. And the record companies are trying to find a way to sucessfully put an end to that as well, except it isn't so easy. If they had their pick, I imagine they would go for the rental store. It works for the movie industry after all.