Record locking, do away with check-in check-out (Score 1)

If this same concept were to be applied to movies, would you have to lend the whole content, or could you lend portions such as one frame or scan line at a time? That means that you could then feed out a movie to thousands of people at a time each having a slight delay in-between.

If someone did steal the contents by not checking them back in you would then loose the rights to display that movie again. Unless you have some sort of system setup so you know exactly who is using your contents, you would have a hard time forcing them to check the content back in.

If someone did check the contents back in but really kept a copy, you would be in the clear. The person who copied it would be violating copyright laws (assuming they use that content again). This is comparable to the video rental scheme where they rent you the physical movie media, if you don't return it they cannot distribute that physical movie media anymore. But if you copy the physical movie media and then return it, the rental place can continue distributing it, and you violated the copyright laws (assuming you ever play the video without having it checked out again).

To make it simpler you could do away with the check-in and check-out procedures and simply have a agreement which states that they cannot copy the video. Then you would have a streaming system on the backend that would take care of locking the whole files or portions of files depending on what is considered legal.