[RawAlex]

Bottom up: When you buy a recording, you are granted non-distribution use. You cannot resell, redistribute, or otherwise reuse with permission. Exceptions do exist (as you mentioned) for places that rent videos / movies / music, but they are limited by being able to only lend or rent original copies, they may not make copies and rent those.

Anyone putting music online for download is immediately in violation of their license, unless they have a license for re-distribution. As they would entail a royalty to get paid for every unit distributed, it is extremely unlikely (read not going to happen) that anyone would do this for free.

Even that big russian MP3 site that sells the music super cheap is in violation, indirectly, because they are paying the russian level fees only (very low) and then distributing worldwide (which they don't have the rights to do).

For your video tape, you can fix it all you want. repair the heck out of it. Knock yourself out. You can do whatever you want with the product, including recording over it or using it as a door stop. But when the mechanism no longer works, you don't have much come back to either the manufacture or the artist. Further, as a video rental store, you would not be allowed normally to copy the movie and rent the copy,see above. So your physical copy is in a sense your licensed copy. Lose the copy, potentially lose the license.

The license for the content and the delivery method are interlinked, unavoidably.

If you buy a PPV movie, and record it while you are watching it, that is an acceptable trade off (for personal use). When you give that tape to a friend to watch the movie, in theory you have violated the copyright and the license that was granted to your when you paid for the PPV movie. Further, if you did not record the PPV movie, your license to the movie lapsed as the movie ended. You could not take your cable bill to Best Buy and demand that they give you a free copy because you paid for it on PPV. You also can't take your movie stub from the theatre and demand your cable company give you free PPV.

It also doesn't extend you the rights to then go and download a copy online. First (as mentioned above) the person posting it doesn't have the right, so you would be receiving stolen property, even if you have at some point in your life owned or paid for certain limited rights regarding the movie.

So in response to your first point, while you may be granted a "lifetime" license, it is effectively a lifetime license from the original product in it's original format, plus whatever legal backup copies you may have made from that original copy. Having purchased it once on 8 track does not give you unlimited access to the same work in any other format. You purchase a content / format combination.

All that said, will they come after you for it? Probably not in any single case. But I think it would make for some very interesting arguments in court if you had 1000 CDs of music you downloaded because at some time in your life you either bought the album, watch the music video on TV (another delivery method) or attended a concert.