Skip to main content

The Parallel Import and the “First Sale” Doctrine Survive, For Now

By
American libraries celebrated a legal victory last week in the Supreme Court’s disposition of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons.  The Court ruled that the appellant’s legal purchase of inexpensive books in Thailand and resale of the same books in the United States at a higher price, a form of arbitrage known as a parallel import, is protected  under the “first sale” doctrine: the principle that someone who purchases a single copy of a copyrighted work owns that one copy and may resell it or give it away without needing permission from the copyright holder.
The libraries’ celebration may be premature.  Since 2010, the United States has been engaged in multilateral negotiations to form the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed free trade zone for Pacific Rim nations.  Among other things, the TPP proposes a new intellectual property regime that would effectively nullify the Kirtsaeng ruling by banning parallel imports and severely restricting the “first sale” doctrine.  Of further concern to libraries are several other items under negotiation that have the potential to rewrite substantial portions of U.S. and international intellectual property law.
The nations participating in the ongoing TPP negotiations appear to be in some disagreement over the final form of any intellectual property provisions, but are very likely to revisit the issue in the 17th round of TPP negotiations this May 15-24.  Anyone interested in intellectual property law might want to consider following these negotiations.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le...
1 comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

By Anonymous
“Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.” –Martin Luther King Jr.   Last week, I had the pleasure of attending  Professor Zachary D. Kaufman ’s presentation on  Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda  hosted by the  Johannesburg Holocaust & Geno cide Ce ntre . Among the many takeaways highlighted by Professor Kaufman and drawn from  Lessons from Rwanda: Post-Genocide Law and Policy   were ten simple yet profound lessons:   Lesson #1: Hate speech is dangerous.   To illustrate the role that hate speech played in the Rwandan genocide, Professor Kaufman discussed multiple forms of  propaganda , such as Kangura, Radio Rwanda, and RTLM “hate radio.”   He concludes that we must have limits, including with respect to social media, and further asserts that social media must do a better jo...
Post a Comment
Read more