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How the hell does that fall under copyright? The "only to be sold in country X" effectively tries to be an agreement in which geographic locations certain item
by yason 14y ago
How the hell does that fall under copyright?
The "only to be sold in country X" effectively tries to be an agreement in which geographic locations certain items can be sold. No copies are involved and no copies are made. Copyright controls, well, the right to make copies. Reselling shouldn't have anything to do with copyright.
(Note that those warnings that try to be artificial restrictions are deep from the arse. They deliberately try to prevent the market from working for the benefit of one company.)
- ubernostrum 14y agoCopyright includes the right to decide whether copies will be sold at all. That right traditionally ends, for any given copy, once that copy has been sold for the first time, which is the first-sale doctrine. The quirk in this case is that it's dealing with things which had been legally sold... but not in the United States, and the doctrine is actually that the right to control sale of copies ends at the first authorized sale that occurs in the United States, not at the first sale that occurs anywhere in the world. Since the textbooks were purchased elsewhere and then imported, they had not undergone a first sale in the US, and so US first-sale doctrine had not ended the copyright holder's right to control sale.