The VPPA may be nearly four-decades old and video-rental stores largely a thing of the past, but the rise of online content, streaming services and ancillary activities has brought with it frequent litigation based on the VPPA. The key challenge in these litigations is how to interpret the VPPA’s 1980s terms in light of today’s digital advances.
The Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA), 18 U.S.C. §2710, was aimed at preventing the “wrongful disclosure” of personal information about “consumers” — also labeled in the statute as “subscribers,” though the VPPA didn’t define the word — who rented or bought video tape products such as movies and TV shows. The VPPA prohibited disclosure by the seemingly outdated term “a video tape service provider” of “personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider” without the consumer’s consent. “Video tape service provider” was defined in §2710(a)(4) as “any person, engaged in the business … of rental, sale, or delivery of prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials.”
In Osheske v. Silver Cinemas Acquisition Co., 23-3882, Ninth Circuit federal appeals court Judge M. Margaret McKeown noted in a March 27, 2025, ruling on the VPPA: “The original impetus for the VPPA arose during President Ronald Reagan’s contested [and rebuked] nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, when the Washington City Paper published a profile of Judge Bork based on a leaked list of 146 films that he and his family had rented from a local video store.”
