Justice Weighs Case on Imported Text Books

         In Washington, 2010, The Supreme Court is investigating 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 text books that his friends and relatives had bought abroad and shipped to him. 

           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. The case was then closed with no charges nor fines.