On October 29, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. The case revolves around the “first sale doctrine” which allows the owner of a lawfully obtained copyrighted work to dispose of that copy without the approval of the owner of the copyright.
At issue in this case is a practice of buying cheaper foreign editions of college textbooks, then reselling them to students in the U.S. This is done under the first sale doctrine, but some copyright owners insist that federal law does not allow it.
Three Circuit Courts have heard cases regarding the first sale doctrine, and each court has made a different ruling. The Second Circuit declaring that foreign-made works can never be resold in the U.S. without the copyright owner’s consent, the Ninth Circuit ruling that such a foreign-made product sometimes can be sold in the U.S. without permission, but only after the owner has approved an earlier sale inside the U.S., and the Third Circuit deciding that such a product can always be re-sold without permission, so long as the copyright owner had authorized the first sale that occurred overseas.
