<story><title>First Sale Under Siege: If You Bought It, You Should Own It</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/first-sale-under-siege-if-you-bought-it-you-should-own-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>EFF is leaving very important details out about at least Kirtsaeng. What&apos;s happening in that case is not simply that publishers are trying to claw back rights from US consumers. Supap Kirtsaeng took advantage of discounted pricing that Wiley offered students in poorer countries to arbitrage prices. This trick is called &quot;parallel importation&quot; (or &quot;grey market importation&quot;) and it&apos;s a legal grey area, especially where copyright is concerned, turning on whether owners exhaust the right &lt;i&gt;to import&lt;/i&gt; on first sale.&lt;p&gt;In short, the defendant in Kirtsaeng is taking advantage of a discount program Wiley never intended to offer that defendant in the first place in order to subvert Wiley&apos;s whole pricing scheme. Whether Wiley can use a legal argument about first sale to stop this or not, it seems apparent that Wiley will one way or another prevent that from happening.&lt;p&gt;Knowing HN, these details probably don&apos;t do much to change your view of the case. But you should still want to know them! This is something the EFF used to be good at, but now is quite bad at, and despite the fact that EFF mostly supports causes I agree with, I urge you to direct your donations to ACLU or other civil liberties charities instead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>schoen</author><text>(I work for EFF.)&lt;p&gt;This article is a quick end-of-year summary of two issues that have been active during the year. The description of what Kirtsaeng was doing was likely omitted for brevity, not as a cover-up. (The person who asked my coworkers to write these end-of-year posts specifically asked for short, broad summaries instead of detailed analysis.)&lt;p&gt;If you follow the link given in the article (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/parade-horribles-supreme-court-first-sale-kirtsaeng-v-wiley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/parade-horribles-supre...&lt;/a&gt;), you&apos;ll see another article from October by my colleague Parker, where he writes:&lt;p&gt;&quot;Wiley claims that this doctrine only applies to goods that are manufactured in the U.S., and that the defendant, Supap Kirtsaeng, was infringing its copyright by purchasing books at a reduced rate in his native Thailand and selling them below list price in the States.&quot;&lt;p&gt;This description appeared on the same EFF blog (Deeplinks) where the item that you&apos;re concerned about did.&lt;p&gt;One of the most important aspects of the Kirtsaeng case that we&apos;ve tried to get the Supreme Court to appreciate is that the plaintiff&apos;s theory would limit first sale in a wide range of situations. (One example is artworks, like paintings or manuscripts, that were produced outside of the U.S. and that were brought to the United States by their legitimate owners, who are not the copyright holders. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, there is also a question of whether publishers intending to sell works in the United States can choose the location of their manufacturing operations to make first sale a dead letter.) So even people who think that parallel importation as practiced by Supap Kirtsaeng is bad or should be restricted by law may have cause to be concerned about the Kirtsaeng case. Those consequences and concerns are the focus of this summary post.</text></comment>
<story><title>First Sale Under Siege: If You Bought It, You Should Own It</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/first-sale-under-siege-if-you-bought-it-you-should-own-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>EFF is leaving very important details out about at least Kirtsaeng. What&apos;s happening in that case is not simply that publishers are trying to claw back rights from US consumers. Supap Kirtsaeng took advantage of discounted pricing that Wiley offered students in poorer countries to arbitrage prices. This trick is called &quot;parallel importation&quot; (or &quot;grey market importation&quot;) and it&apos;s a legal grey area, especially where copyright is concerned, turning on whether owners exhaust the right &lt;i&gt;to import&lt;/i&gt; on first sale.&lt;p&gt;In short, the defendant in Kirtsaeng is taking advantage of a discount program Wiley never intended to offer that defendant in the first place in order to subvert Wiley&apos;s whole pricing scheme. Whether Wiley can use a legal argument about first sale to stop this or not, it seems apparent that Wiley will one way or another prevent that from happening.&lt;p&gt;Knowing HN, these details probably don&apos;t do much to change your view of the case. But you should still want to know them! This is something the EFF used to be good at, but now is quite bad at, and despite the fact that EFF mostly supports causes I agree with, I urge you to direct your donations to ACLU or other civil liberties charities instead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glesica</author><text>In a global economy, restrictions on parallel importation are destructive and backward.&lt;p&gt;What happened to &quot;free trade&quot;? I see no difference between buying something in country A and selling it in country B and buying and selling within the borders of country A.&lt;p&gt;As borders continue to fade away, restrictions on importation will become restrictions on first sale rights. So I really draw no distinction, personally.</text></comment>