Your right to resell your own items might be ruled illegal. This U.S. Supreme Court Case is scheduled for October 29th 2012. At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the First Sale Doctrine in Copyright Law, which allows you to buy & sell things like electronics, books, artwork, furniture, jewelry, etc., as well as CDs & DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products.
Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your wares without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale. That’s being challenged now for products that are made abroad & 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. This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.
THE YELLOW SUBMARINE
Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale. Your personal electronic devices or the family jewels that have been passed down from your great grandparents who immigrated from the United Kingdom. It could be a book that was written by an American writer but printed & bound overseas, or an Italian painter’s artwork.
There are implications for a variety of wide ranging U.S. entities, including libraries, musicians, museums & even resale sellers on eBay & Craigslist. Including other auction houses like Christie's & Sotheby's or any Live Online resale Internet Sites like King's Auctions. U.S. libraries for example, sometimes carry 200 million books from foreign publishers, they would no longer be able to carry them.
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 & ship them to him in the United States. According to court documents, he then sold them on eBay, approximately making $1.2 million.
#1 1997 PVC MADE IN CHINA
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 considered legal to resell. A free market in our modern economy is fundamental & now that may all change. The mom & pop resale stores will go out of business because they can't afford the price for permission!!! HECK, who can spend more money just to resell.
MARILYN MONROE GLAMOUR CALENDAR 1997 PRINTED IN HONG KONG
For example, it could become an incentive for manufacturers to have everything produced overseas because they would be able to control every resale. It could also become a weighty issue for auto trade-ins & resales, considering about 40% of most U.S. made cars carry technology & parts that were made overseas. This is a particularly important decision for Internet sites like eBay & Craigslist, whose very business platform relies on the secondary marketplace. These sites will fail if every seller had to get permission from every foreign country to sell their wares.
In its Friend-Of-The-Court Brief, eBay noted that the Second Circuit’s rule “affords copyright owners the ability to control the downstream sales of goods for which they have already been paid.” It also “allows for significant adverse consequences for trade, e-commerce, secondary markets, small businesses, consumers & jobs in the United States.” Millions of Americans would be affected by this. If the Supreme Court does rule with the Appellate Court, it’s likely that the matter would be brought to Congress to force a change in the law. Consumers would be stuck between a rock & a hard place when trying to resell their wares. AND what about vintage collectibles & antiques??? Will there be certain era's you can sell anything from??? Or will they just suck the blood from every hard working American across the board!!! Sorry, but it is Halloween this month...
IN OUR EBAY STORE WHILE YOU CAN...
IF THE U.S. SUPREME COURT DENIES THE FIRST SALE APPEAL
For More INFO & PHOTOS of our Awesome Treasures
& Hollywood Icon Celebrity Collectibles.
Just Click: COOL COLLECTIBLES
Lyndy Ward
No comments:
Post a Comment