Supreme Court to decide if we can sell our own things??

[Jane]

Will SCOTUS Make It Illegal to Resell Your Stuff?

By Natasha Lennard, Salon

25 October 12



The Supreme Court will hear the case below on Monday October 29th. For more information see ACT NOW: DON'T LET BIG BUSINESS STEAL OUR RIGHT TO RESELL WHAT WE OWN! http://www.youvebeenowned.org/#alarm

f you buy an iPod or a phone, a book or a DVD, it's currently legal to resell it, as thousands of eBay and Craigslist posts attest.

However, as Jennifer Waters at MarketWatch reports, a little-known case "tucked into the U.S. Supreme Court's agenda this fall could upend your ability to resell everything from your grandmother's antique furniture to your iPhone 4."

Under current law - on the books since 1908 - copyright holders only have control over the first sale, so while I cannot take iPhones straight off the factory line and sell them, I am able to sell a device that I first bought from a retailer.

This, Waters reports, is being challenged:

If the Supreme Court upholds an appellate court ruling, it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you permission to sell it.

...The case stems from Supap Kirtsaeng's college experience. A native of Thailand, Kirtsaeng came to America in 1997 to study at Cornell University. When he discovered that his textbooks, produced by Wiley, were substantially cheaper to buy in Thailand than they were in Ithaca, N.Y., he rallied his Thai relatives to buy the books and ship them to him in the United States. He then sold them on eBay, making upward of $1.2 million, according to court documents.

Wiley, which admitted that it charged less for books sold abroad than it did in the United States, sued him for copyright infringement. Kirtsaeng countered with the first-sale doctrine. In August 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court's ruling that anything that was manufactured overseas is not subject to the first-sale principle. Only American-made products or "copies manufactured domestically" were.

There would be serious implications for manufacturers and online giants like Craigslist and eBay were SCOTUS to uphold the ruling. Firstly, it would become an incentive to manufacture overseas so that all resales could then be controlled and charged for by the copyright holder. Secondly, the entire of eBay and Craigslist's business would be jeopardized. "If sellers had to get permission to peddle their wares on the sites, they likely wouldn't do it," Waters notes.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE: http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/14172-will-scot...

[Willy]

You could turn that around and say that since people would not be allowed to freely resell  foreign made goods but still be able to resell American made goods then that would be a boom for American made products because who would purchase items they could not resell. I think if this is upheld it would make U.S. manufactured products much more attractive.

[XLFD]

Markets and student bookstores-- this reminds me of a statement I made in Tea With an Occupy Student, a thread from last year: 

"...the public university he attended, in cahoots with the student book store, had artificially created the environment for being able to charge outrageous fees for books that the citizens of that university (students) either had to pay, or risk failure in their classes. This explained why the two books he had to buy at the book store cost more than twice the amount he had to pay elsewhere for his six other books.

The free market forces consisting of stores that rent out text books for a price cheaper than buying even a used copy, stores that buy and then sell used texts, internet services that connect those wanting to ditch a text with those with a need for them, students willing to barter texts, etc. If the campus' politics allowed less of a monopoly for the campus' bookstore by giving them nonpreferential treatment, then the market forces would provide a more reasonable price for every student.

Critics of the free market are quick to malign the dreaded profit motive but it works beautifully here. The intention of organizers of alternatives to the campus bookstore is irrelevant. The market forces and competition among all the stores benefits the students.

As a result the campus bookstore finds that it can only charge so much before students will go elsewhere. In other words, there is a ceiling placed on their prices by competition with the other bookstores.

Imagine how much books would cost in the absence of any competitor to the campus bookstore. There would be virtually no limit to how much they could charge. And people think text books are expensive now!"

I would rather see the real problem here tackled by the Supreme Court, which is the totally anti-capitalistic methods used to hyperinflate college textbooks, which this poor foreign student used to his advantage in making his obscene profits. 

[Willy]

Good points X. I'm sure colleges and universities are in cahoots with publishers and bookstores and I'm sure they get a kick back from book sales. With this current Supreme Court everything is a toss up. Who knows how they will rule after the Obamacare fiasco. This is going to be very interesting.