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From Wikipedia: > The first-sale doctrine is a legal concept that plays an important role in United States patent, copyright and trademark law by limiting the

by joecot 6y ago

From Wikipedia: > The first-sale doctrine is a legal concept that plays an important role in United States patent, copyright and trademark law by limiting the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property. That means I should be able to sell my glasses to someone without the original creator causing problems with it. It's more complicated than that, but that's the gist. If I bought these glasses and they shut down the service and refund me, fine, whatever. But what if I bought the glasses, decided 4 months later I didn't like them, sold them on Craigslist for $600, and moved on with my life? After the shut down I get $800 back, and the poor sap who bought them from me gets a pair of worthless glasses and a dead craigslist email. Luckily this company will most likely get away with it because of the "it's more complicated than that" part.

jjcon 6y ago
First sale only applies to the goods - it does in no way (or in any country) apply to services. It certainly does not require a company to offer a service for free in perpetuity. You can still sell the glasses, first sale allows that. It doesn’t say they must maintain their value. There may be a false advertising case or fraud case here I’m not sure - but this has nothing to do with first sale.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Remote bricking of a device I own without my knowledge AND consent is legally actionable if I know where to send the certified letter from my lawyer. In this case, I do.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    Literally everything CAN be legally actionable. Unless it was previously explicitly agreed upon, a company can turn off a costly service they are providing at their will. Did you have an explicit agreement arranged? Again though... this has nothing to do with first sale.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    You have no legal cause of action if the company is refunding your purchase of the device in full, or if you already sold the device to someone else. Moreover, there is a difference between disabling the functionality of the device and disabling the remote (i.e., cloud) software the device may depend on to function. The first might be legally actionable, but the second is not.
    - gpm 6y ago
      > You have no legal cause of action if the company is refunding your purchase of the device in full [snip] You absolutely do. Companies who sold you something do not have the right to steal it back in exchange for a refund. Its your device, the transaction has been made, they are out of luck. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline. Of course, this (and basically all law surrounding ownership) applies to things and not services, and charitably I assume that these devices are stopping working because an online service is stopping working, and not because Google randomly decided to hack into your device and break it in plain violation of the law, but let's not pretend that "giving a refund" is a generally acceptable solution. And of course... if you have a contract with North (now Google) guaranteeing that they will provide the service indefinitely, and that contract doesn't include a term allowing Google to stop providing the service, you could still sue for injunctive relief requiring them to continue running the service. I assume you don't just because most companies aren't stupid enough to give out such contracts.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        You absolutely do. Companies who sold you something do not have the right to steal it back in exchange for a refund. Its your device, the transaction has been made, they are out of luck. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline. You absolutely do not. Legal damages are measured in monetary terms, and your putative damages are the amount you paid for the good. If the company refunds that in full, you have no legal cause of action; moreover, you are likely to end up owing the company for the legal fees they incur in defending themselves. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline. You can certainly do so. And the court will almost immediately toss out any case you may file against the company. And of course... if you have a contract with North (now Google) guaranteeing that they will provide the service indefinitely, and that contract doesn't include a term allowing Google to stop providing the service, you could still sue for injunctive relief requiring them to continue running the service. I don't know where you learned law, but this is absolutely false. The primary remedy provided by the court system is monetary not equitable. Courts will rarely if ever grant an injunction requiring a company to keep operating a service. They don't even do that in discrimination cases. Courts generally award monetary damages to users that suffered economic harm as a result of the service being discontinued. Moreover, under centuries of US and British law, any contract that has an "indefinite" length is merely deemed to have a "reasonable" length. Courts have invalidated contracts that attempted to bind one or both parties for infinite terms.
- itake 6y ago
  When you buy the glasses, what exactly are you buying? Are you saying that you're literally just buying the locked down hardware and any software services running in the cloud are not included in the purchase? These services are provided purely out of kindness of the company?
  - jjcon 6y ago
    > Are you saying that you're literally just buying the locked down hardware and any software services running in the cloud are not included in the purchase? Legally (in every jurisdiction I’m aware of) yes. If they misled the buyers with false advertising or committed fraud along the way that would be an issue but again... not a first sale issue.
tialaramex 6y ago
Suppose you have a 40Mbps vDSL setup, and you bought a $50 "router" to consume the 40Mbps vDSL signal and give you WiFi Internet access. You bought the router from your ISP outright, but it was supplied pre-configured with your username and password and so on because hey, they are your ISP. A few years later you get fancy 10Gbps fibre Internet from a startup called say "Glass Everywhere" that thinks everybody should be doing live VR sessions. GE provides a new WiFi router, though it's unclear whether you actually own it or it's somehow rented with the service. You sell the first WiFi router on Craigslist for $30. The person who buys it does not get 40Mbps vDSL Internet service from your old ISP. Even though the router still has your old credentials for that ISP, you terminated the account weeks ago and it doesn't work. Courts understand that the WiFi router, and the service it enabled access to, are not the same thing, and that you cannot possibly sell unlimited access to the Internet in the form of a WiFi router, you were just selling this object, and if the purchaser didn't understand what it's for Caveat Emptor because this is a private sale. The glasses work fine. The "poor sap" got working glasses. The service went away. If you implied the service comes with the glasses, they might very well have a claim on you for it going away, and I'd recommend giving their $600 back, otherwise they got what they paid for, Caveat Emptor. First Sale has been eroded to the point it's barely worth talking about, but it was never intended to apply to situations like this.
gamblor956 6y ago
That's not how the first sale doctrine works. The first sale doctrine just means that you can re-sell a physical product embodying some IP without needing to get a license from the IP-owner to make the sale. Technically, for refund/warranty/other ownership purposes, the second-hand buyer now stands in your shoes, and should be entitled to the refund. You could theoretically claim it yourself, but in many states would be committing fraud in doing so.

by joecot 6y ago

jjcon 6y ago

First sale only applies to the goods - it does in no way (or in any country) apply to services. It certainly does not require a company to offer a service for free in perpetuity. You can still sell the glasses, first sale allows that. It doesn’t say they must maintain their value. There may be a false advertising case or fraud case here I’m not sure - but this has nothing to do with first sale.

aspenmayer 6y ago
Remote bricking of a device I own without my knowledge AND consent is legally actionable if I know where to send the certified letter from my lawyer. In this case, I do.
- jjcon 6y ago
  Literally everything CAN be legally actionable. Unless it was previously explicitly agreed upon, a company can turn off a costly service they are providing at their will. Did you have an explicit agreement arranged? Again though... this has nothing to do with first sale.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  You have no legal cause of action if the company is refunding your purchase of the device in full, or if you already sold the device to someone else. Moreover, there is a difference between disabling the functionality of the device and disabling the remote (i.e., cloud) software the device may depend on to function. The first might be legally actionable, but the second is not.
  - gpm 6y ago
    > You have no legal cause of action if the company is refunding your purchase of the device in full [snip] You absolutely do. Companies who sold you something do not have the right to steal it back in exchange for a refund. Its your device, the transaction has been made, they are out of luck. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline. Of course, this (and basically all law surrounding ownership) applies to things and not services, and charitably I assume that these devices are stopping working because an online service is stopping working, and not because Google randomly decided to hack into your device and break it in plain violation of the law, but let's not pretend that "giving a refund" is a generally acceptable solution. And of course... if you have a contract with North (now Google) guaranteeing that they will provide the service indefinitely, and that contract doesn't include a term allowing Google to stop providing the service, you could still sue for injunctive relief requiring them to continue running the service. I assume you don't just because most companies aren't stupid enough to give out such contracts.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      You absolutely do. Companies who sold you something do not have the right to steal it back in exchange for a refund. Its your device, the transaction has been made, they are out of luck. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline. You absolutely do not. Legal damages are measured in monetary terms, and your putative damages are the amount you paid for the good. If the company refunds that in full, you have no legal cause of action; moreover, you are likely to end up owing the company for the legal fees they incur in defending themselves. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline. You can certainly do so. And the court will almost immediately toss out any case you may file against the company. And of course... if you have a contract with North (now Google) guaranteeing that they will provide the service indefinitely, and that contract doesn't include a term allowing Google to stop providing the service, you could still sue for injunctive relief requiring them to continue running the service. I don't know where you learned law, but this is absolutely false. The primary remedy provided by the court system is monetary not equitable. Courts will rarely if ever grant an injunction requiring a company to keep operating a service. They don't even do that in discrimination cases. Courts generally award monetary damages to users that suffered economic harm as a result of the service being discontinued. Moreover, under centuries of US and British law, any contract that has an "indefinite" length is merely deemed to have a "reasonable" length. Courts have invalidated contracts that attempted to bind one or both parties for infinite terms.
itake 6y ago
When you buy the glasses, what exactly are you buying? Are you saying that you're literally just buying the locked down hardware and any software services running in the cloud are not included in the purchase? These services are provided purely out of kindness of the company?
- jjcon 6y ago
  > Are you saying that you're literally just buying the locked down hardware and any software services running in the cloud are not included in the purchase? Legally (in every jurisdiction I’m aware of) yes. If they misled the buyers with false advertising or committed fraud along the way that would be an issue but again... not a first sale issue.

tialaramex 6y ago

Suppose you have a 40Mbps vDSL setup, and you bought a $50 "router" to consume the 40Mbps vDSL signal and give you WiFi Internet access. You bought the router from your ISP outright, but it was supplied pre-configured with your username and password and so on because hey, they are your ISP. A few years later you get fancy 10Gbps fibre Internet from a startup called say "Glass Everywhere" that thinks everybody should be doing live VR sessions. GE provides a new WiFi router, though it's unclear whether you actually own it or it's somehow rented with the service. You sell the first WiFi router on Craigslist for $30. The person who buys it does not get 40Mbps vDSL Internet service from your old ISP. Even though the router still has your old credentials for that ISP, you terminated the account weeks ago and it doesn't work. Courts understand that the WiFi router, and the service it enabled access to, are not the same thing, and that you cannot possibly sell unlimited access to the Internet in the form of a WiFi router, you were just selling this object, and if the purchaser didn't understand what it's for Caveat Emptor because this is a private sale. The glasses work fine. The "poor sap" got working glasses. The service went away. If you implied the service comes with the glasses, they might very well have a claim on you for it going away, and I'd recommend giving their $600 back, otherwise they got what they paid for, Caveat Emptor. First Sale has been eroded to the point it's barely worth talking about, but it was never intended to apply to situations like this.

gamblor956 6y ago

That's not how the first sale doctrine works. The first sale doctrine just means that you can re-sell a physical product embodying some IP without needing to get a license from the IP-owner to make the sale. Technically, for refund/warranty/other ownership purposes, the second-hand buyer now stands in your shoes, and should be entitled to the refund. You could theoretically claim it yourself, but in many states would be committing fraud in doing so.