Ebay sent me this link because I sell used stuff.

"An upcoming Supreme Court case, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, involves an eBay seller who was sued by a textbook publisher for reselling books. The seller, a graduate student and entrepreneurial seller, sold the books to help cover tuition expenses. These were legitimate books that the book publisher manufactured overseas — they were not counterfeit, pirated, or stolen. Yet, the publisher is trying to use U.S. copyright law to stop the book sales and make the seller pay $600,000 in damages – more than 15 times what he made from selling the books.

It is possible that an extreme application of U.S. copyright law might enable manufacturers to force retailers and consumers to first have to obtain permission from the manufacturer before reselling or even donating goods manufactured overseas. This rule could affect most of the goods we use every day, from books to cell phones. Manufacturers would retain ownership of an item no matter how many times it changes owner. This rule could threaten the laws of ownership and resale that we all enjoy.

When you purchase an item on eBay, you should be able to resell it, give it away, or use it as you see fit. Likewise, when you sell an item on eBay, ownership of the item should transfer to the buyer.

Citizens for Ownership Rights (CFOR) is a coalition of public interest organizations asking individuals to stand up for their rights as buyers and sellers. CFOR is currently gathering signatures for a petition that will be sent directly to the President and Attorney General urging them to support the rights of Americans to purchase legitimate goods, resell those goods, give them away, or use them in any legal manner as they see fit. Visit ownershiprights.org and sign the petition to protect your ownership rights."

http://www.ebaymainstreet.com/news-even ... ller-email

Considering almost everything is made overseas now this is a really worrisome precedent.


If the case rules against consumer rights I think we should pass a law saying that any product you are not free to resell has to have a label saying "you don't own this" . Maybe that would at least drive down prices or imports or increase sales of US made goods.

a) I hope this thread doesn't get booted as spam, or otherwise undesirable.
b) I shared this on facebook.
c) The original circumstance, unfortunately, doesn't specify whether the book the fellow had sold were his 'used' textbooks - though I suspect they probably were. Back in my college days I did a stint as a used bookbuyer for Folletts - buying from students at the end of term for the company (from a prefered list) that the local campus bookstore was not taking back for the next term, as well as from the professors/instructors in their offices.

[Dang it, paper *is* in my blood!]

This is just stupid... What will they say to all the used book STORES in the world? I know in my area alone, there are at least 5 used book stores selling everything from trash novels to hard back classics. What? Are they gonna attempt to close down a mom and pop over a $1.50 Louis La'more now? These freaking IP suits are getting out of hand. I'm about to become a hermit with a big gun.

$40k!

That is a lot of books!

The real question here is whether the US Supreme Court will come up with a decision that protects the rights of individuals as well as the corporations with the resources to pay large legal teams. With the slide of the US legal system into the Rule of Lawyers (c.f. the Rule of Law) and the previous administration's politicising of the Supreme Court means there's a material risk the Court may produce a decisions that resolves the immediate commercial question without adequate consideration for its implications for the general public. eBay are wise in attempting to politicise this issue.

They'll say they have not right to resell them as the person who sold/gave them the book lacked that right to start with.

The kid in the actual case didn't sell his used text books, he had family from Thailand purchase books on his behalf and ship them to him (there may be some duty/tariff issues with that) so he could resell them above the Thai price but significantly below the inflated US price. He was rewarded with having to pay a HUGE penalty for doing something that doesn't even seem illegal (except for the possible duty/tariff thing).

I shared this link on my Facebook after a friend posted it and signed the petition. I did a quick google search of both the case in question and read over the wiki entry for the website before doing so. Not exactly thorough research, but enough to satisfy me.

I still do not see how this can even be considered under copyright law. The person in question did not reproduce them. They were bought and paid for!

Yeah, it's pretty questionable. My wife and I didn't see eye to eye on this where she assumed he'd know that he was going to get into trouble. I could see him expecting the bookstore and maybe college being upset, but personally I never would have expected the publisher to step in, especially since they did get paid for the work (even if it was the lower price they choose to charge in Thailand). To me it seems the same as buying stock at discount from a store going out of business and reselling it for full price.

For a bit of a Devil's Advocate point of view, you should probably ALWAYS do your research before initiating ANY kind of international trade.

I haven't seen anything talking about a customs issue. I doubt he lied on the customs forms. Why would he? To my knowledge there are no laws against bringing books into the US. The lawsuit is all about him selling books without the publishers permission. I don't see why anyone would think they needed it.

Look at ebay. All those sellers in china and Thailand selling usb cables and cell phone cases. I'm wondering if all of them might be facing this kind of lawsuit. Probably all the dollar stores too.

I never thought there was such a law. But I'm not surprised companies have a legal right to gouge us.

full price book in Thialand + shipping to US (possibly customs fees) + ebay fees on sale price & shipping + paypal fees on sale price & shipping + shipping + shipping supplies. And he still made enough profit to make this worth his time! How much do they mark up the prices of books for sale in the US?

A ton. When doing my masters, books regularly cost between 20 and 175 dollars apiece. As an undergrad, I had several geology books that cost 350 dollars apiece. Sucks when you had to have between 6 and 24 books total for the semester.

This lawsuit really has no merit. I say that but, we'll see what the insane.. oops I meant Supreme Court says.

Yeah, I wasn't saying there was an issue, but that I could understand if he had broken some law like that. I would assume books bought and returned to the states (for any reason) would still be subject to duty taxes just like anything else. But again, not the issue that landed him in trouble.

It's supply and demand...or maybe just demand price gouging since supply isn't really an issue. You have a school saying "This is the book you MUST buy." The internet has allowed you some option to shop around and buy cheaper, but it's not without inconvenience. So the book shop (conveniently owned by the school) can basically set the price.

This is untrue.

It is utterly legal to sell something you own. End of discussion.



Ohhh.... Geographic borders.. That may be illegal. ie you buy in the States, its illegal in Canada.

I think it depends on whether the seller knew of the restrictions on the objects originally sold. Or more importantly used ebay to get around such restrictions. As always, intent will play a key factor in this case.


My guess is that this is an expensive fiasco. I have a feeling this will come out in the seller's favor.

Except it may not be. Most books you own aren't produced in the United States and depending on how the ruling goes (and how much they want to specify what's protected) those books/products/any other copyrighted material not manufactured in the United States won't be covered by "The rule of first sale". So it's not just about where you bought it (though that is what brought the case up), the concern is that the statute they're using will have greater consequences.

It actually has nothing to do with whether the seller knew about any restrictions (or whether such restrictions would be interpreted by some lawyers/judges in his favor and against him by others). Ignorance of a law has NEVER been an acceptable defense for breaking it.

Doesn't Thialand have a "rule of first sale"? And presummably shouldn't we have trade agreements with them that honor their property rights.

This case that will directly impact the efficiency of the US knowledge economy. The Supreme Court's decision on this one will affect the availability and cost of books used by students, academics and other knowledge workers all across the country. I hope they take this into consideration as they work this one through.

We (NZ) used to have laws here against parallel importing (i.e. importing something that someone else was selling here under an 'exclusive' license). All they did was protect the inflated prices of the local supplier and restrict the range of products available here.

As off-shore purchasing got easier the price differences got harder and harder to justify, and NZ Customs was wasting more and more time/$ having to check and follow-up on smaller and smaller imports, all to protect the inflated margins of a few middlemen. A few years ago NZ scrapped its parallel importing restrictions. The effect was the worthless middlemen and their margins were stripped out of the market. The few who really did add value survived, the rest were replaced by much more efficient (mostly online) distibutors. Oh yes, and the prices dropped to international levels.

Copyright material (books, movies, games, music) is the last area that is trying to hang onto the inflated margins of yesteryear. They've had to give up some ground, mainly with digital products (though e-books are still highly overpriced - thanks Steve Jobs for that one). What's driving this change is the self-publish and low cost online distributors enable creators to bypass unnecessary middle-men distributors.

Unfortunately, books are proving the slowest to switch to the direct to market model, due a) to the public's attachment to physical books for reading, and b) the (still) high cost of printing books on demand. The effect is that regulation relating to book distribution is also slow to evolve. It will happen, it's just a question of how long it will take.

Forgive me my observations.

We don't own anything we buy. How many licenses of Windows do you own? You do know that you may not put it on more than one machine. Having two kids we have to buy a new version every time we buy a new machine. Each machine has it's own license. I currently have a machine with no word processing software because I don't feel like buying another license of MS Office. We must have bought a dozen licenses over the years. Besides, my other computer has MS 2003 I think. I don't need a new one every year. That is the reason why I don't have Photoshop or Dreamweaver or dozens of other programs I wish I had. I don't have unlimited funds, like many others. I don't even own all the WWG projects I want. I have to make choices.

Our world is moving towards pay to use. We will own nothing. Private ownership is becoming taboo. It may be decades, but it might be just a few years. Get used to it. You will be allowed very little say in world affairs such as this book deal will show. Your opinion will not be needed. Your compliance will be expected. Your need to know laws is irrelevant. In the U.S. our number of laws is over 70,000 I believe I have read recently. Regulations only add to this. Breaking any one of those laws or regulations are already pretty much impossible to not come afoul of. The penalties will be at the discretion of the establishment. Our current Executive Branch has already informed U.S. that they will not uphold certain laws they determine not worthy of upholding. The Executive Branch also creates laws without our Congress which is our law writing branch. Laws will appear in the night, and be fully implemented without notice. Get used to it, or get a new government.

Applying the pay to use model to knowledge is a disaster for a knowledge economy which is what the US economy is these days (services make up approx 79% of US GDP). The US is heading down that route but it is, at best, a medium term game.

Take the patent system for example. Its pay per use model was developed to promote the availability of new industrial technologies. However, its industrial era design is ill suited to the fast pace of the modern information and knowledge economy. These days the patent system is as likely to constrain as promote progress in these areas. And that's just one example of the structural issues that are starting to constrain the US knowledge economy (Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons being another).

China is well on track to overtake the US as the world's foremost knowledge economy. If the US really does want to retain its crown as the leading knowledge economy it's going to have to look beyond the immediate interests of its large corporations (the 'farmers' of US innovation). Instead it needs to take a wider (dare I say it 'Obama-like'? - disclaimer: I am an ignorant foreign observer from outside the US with no local knowledge of the US situation) view and support things (such as free and low cost access to knowledge) that encourage the grass roots knowledge economy, because that's where the innovation that will determine the future of the US economy comes from.

Some more observations/thoughts:

This guy was basically an arbitrageur for these books. This is probably an unconventional path (mostly happens in the stock market), but kudos to him.

I wonder, since we will probably never know, if he had not actually purchased the books, but instead had made the connection to individuals to buy their own if he would be in the same situation. Or would the individuals buying these be in trouble? If this guy sold the info would it be worse then if he sold access? Probably. An interesting exercise, however.

Software as a service (Saas) is rapidly taking the place of traditional software. This model is prevalent in software itself and is similar to things like Netflix, where you pay to access/use the item in questions but you never own it. For some things this makes sense. For others, not so much.

Yup... what he said.

In fact because the average human on earth is now Chinese the global economy is likely to shift to an economy like the Chinese... copy everything and damn the patents and copyrights.

Canada's trade ambassador said exactly this at one point. We're still under the misguided belief that they need us, when in fact its the other way around. Their markets are so large that we have to decide if we wish to participate or not.


Anywho... I believe that you can sell anything you own. Legal contracts are unenforceable after first point of sale.

However side stepping laws and trade zones with sneaky back doors would be a grey area worthy of a law suit.


Personally I avoid lease business models. I won't participate. (Well... since Portal was cheap I got into that.) I buy to own and I will not pay as much if I cannot own it.