Supreme Court Hears Copyright Case on Imported Textbooks

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The New York Times
Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Supreme Court Hears Copyright Case on Imported Textbooks

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Courtheard arguments on Monday in a copyright case about the sale of imported textbooks on eBay that has wide-ranging implications for many products made abroad and sold in the United States.

The case arose from the entrepreneurial impulses of Supap Kirtsaeng, a Thai student who attended Cornell University and the University of Southern California. He helped pay for his education by selling textbooks that his friends and relatives had bought abroad and shipped to him.

Publishers of textbooks, like other manufacturers, often charge different prices in different markets. One publisher, John Wiley & Sons, successfully sued Mr. Kirtsaeng for copyright infringement.

The general rule for products made in the United States is that the owners of particular copies can do what they like with them. If you buy a book or record made in the United States, for instance, you are free to lend it or sell it as you wish. The question for the justices was whether that rule, called the first-sale doctrine, also applies when the works in question were made abroad.

The answer turns on a phrase in the Copyright Act, which appears to limit the first-sale doctrine to works “lawfully made under this title.” The lower courts said that textbooks manufactured outside the United States cannot have been made under American law and so remained subject to the control of the owner of the copyright.

Much of the argument concerned what lawyers call the “parade of horribles” — the hypothetical problems that might follow a ruling in favor of one side or the other.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.