If all goes well next summer will find me in the party rental business.One thing l would like to do is offer rental of equipment to allow patrons to show a movie in their backyard.

l thought it would be a nice feature to have a limited selection of DVD is on hand and allow the renters the option of choosing a movie for their party.This would just be offered as a service and my fee would be the same whether they wanted to use one of my movies or their own.If l were to offer this service, is there a chance that l would have to pay some sort of public viewing royalties?The client would be choosing movies at random and the party would still be private, yet l worry about that 'private exibition' rule.

As l would see it, the fact that you're getting money for a public showing of a DVD would mean you have to pay a fee. Even if you did not charge anything for the DVD directly, you aided and abetted the public showing and there was money changing hands. You could not prove that the rental was not driven by including the DVD. It really opens up a big can of worms. Let them rent their own DVD.