There once was a time when it was, in practice at least, more difficult and costly to copy videocassette tapes than it was music pact discs, puter programs. That, in part, is the justification for how the US Copyright code treats music puter software differently than, say, movies.

It’s also why you see panies, like Blockbuster and Netflix, that specialize in delivering rental videos for limited home usage. panies, like Gamefly, specialize in the rental of video games for consoles like the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360. Gamefly can do this because games for consoles, whether cartridge-based or disc-based, don’t qualify as puter software,” and are thus not under special protection.

And in some states, there are increasing restrictions on how you can sell your used music CDs, for instance.

But as is so often the case in the world of technology, things change rapidly. The advent of the PC and powerful CD and DVD burning technology has made copying DVD movies as easy as copying tracks from a music CD.

Moreover, the PS3 in particular describes itself as a puter entertainment system,” es with a hard drive, to which files can be copied, theoretically easing game load times and storing player profiles and statistics. This raises the question of what truly differentiates a game for the PS3 puter entertainment system” and a game for a PC. Because of the particularities of copyright law, the former can be mercially, while the latter cannot (at least not without direct permission from the copyright holders).

The reason that you can rent games for such console systems is that such a game system is understood to be “a limited puter.” But many PC gaming systems aren’t actually used for anything besides gaming (even though they theoretically could be).

To the extent that this is even true, it may simply be the result of the different copyright treatment of music, puter software, and video games.