9th Circuit Guts "First Sale" Rights | Hacker News Reader

9th Circuit Guts "First Sale" Rights

arstechnica.com

69 pointsCoryOndrejka26 comments

I bet corporation are going to do what Google has done for them on Youtube - get a cut of every activity.

So you'll be allowed to sell your Rolex on ebay, as long as the Rolex company get a percentage of the sale.

There are some really crazy rulings coming out of the courts lately.

"Pro-business" has apparently come to mean that any desire of a company, especially a large company, should be granted. That watch has a company logo? Pay up.

how does costco fit into your model?

Could you expand on this point? I don't see the relationship between the parent's assertion and Costco (even after reading the wikipedia article on Costco).

He means that costco is a business too.

But their desires are not being granted.

Meaning that his "pro-business" argument is wrong, since it's pro one business and against a different one. So his entire premise is false.

Well another issue is that costco is a wholesale company. Anything that is anti-costco is also opposing the untold thousands of small businesses that use costco to get cheap supplies and increase profits.

Just to be perfectly clear (not that you made this mistake, but because I see so many others doing so when this topic comes up):

The terms "pro-business" and "free market" are often taken as synonymous, when nothing could be further from the truth. A real capitalist market is not "pro-business" any more than it is "pro-consumer": it provides a level playing field in which all comers can interact based on their own merits and needs.

The "pro-business" policies that we see so much of are not examples of evil capitalism. They are just as anti-capitalist as is socialism. These policies are more correctly called "corporatism".

Please do not view the economic evils we see today, and use that to tar the ideas of capitalism.

Hey, I have an idea! Let's completely destroy well established foundations of commerce in favor of convoluted, complex and rather insane 'IP' laws. The BEST would be if you had to pay large corporations a tax on every single commerce related action you could conceivably undertake.

The 9th circuit does have a pretty terrible batting average, so I'm confident that this will be overturned.

At some point in the future the legal system will need to be rebooted because of decisions like this.

Every instance of that happening historically has been while in the throes of devastating war, or revolution. It does seem necessary, and it really seems like the US is ratcheting up the pressure higher and that all three branches of government are now captive arms of the plutocracy to the point where they don't even bother with the illusion of evenhandedness anymore.

A "reboot" generally takes the form of violent revolution or war. Softer reboots happen (at least nominally) every 4-8 years as we get new administrations in place.

Legislation and policy can get better over time, incrementally. It feels short-sighted to throw everything out because of (admittedly ugly) decisions like this one.

Code rewrites are always a bad idea...they just need to refactor instead.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

That's exactly what I was getting at. I was even thinking of that article, but I was too lazy to go find it.

I don't think they are gutting anything. They are simply trying to work around the Supreme Court's botched decision in Quality King.

Until I read Quality King, I had no idea that the section 6xx limitations on importing had any connection to the section 1xx exceptions to 17 USC 106. And I doubt that Congress had any idea there was a connection, either.

The 9th Circuit is trying to find a way to read section 109 so as to undo Quality King and get back to what Congress intended--unauthorized importation of copyrighted works, other than for personal use, is prohibited.

So the intended meaning is that a used-book store in Amsterdam can't sell a batch of books to a used-book store in NYC without individually contacting each of the books' copyright holders and asking for their permission to import the book?

The idea is that the multi-nationals can sell stuff to third worlders at near cost to build market share or comply with price controls and mark up 500% in another country to take advantage of subsidies, medicare reimbursements, perceived brand "value", or on-the-sly price collusion with other vendors and no screwy small fry grey market traders can get in the way of their "marketing policies".

Yep, in other words it's bullshit.

the Supreme Court's botched decision in Quality King

The footer of the Supreme Court ruling says it was a unanimous decision. More than likely, the problem lies in how the law was written, not in how it was interpreted.

Because a wristwatch is a copyrighted work.

You've gotten distracted by the handwaving and forgotten that the "copyrighted work" here is essentially a wristwatch. Specifically, they're talking about the logo they put on the wristwatch, but to argue that a logo on an item brings the whole item under copyright law is madness.

It's especially mad since there's no copying taking place at all.

Why are they not suing for breach of contract, which (should / would) contain specifications on selling products regarding the market they would be in

Because you can't sue a reseller for breaching a contract if you never had a contract with them in the first place.

True in this specific case; not true in general:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privity_of_contract#Exceptions

Also notice that this doesn't include prominent examples from labor law (company A that hires someone who will knowingly break a non-compete agreement they held with company B can be held liable even though company A wasn't a party to the contract (c.f. the MSFT/GOOG executive hiring war)).

many companies that sell imported goods hold contacts to protect interst on both sides mfg and seller.

Why would you not try and protect your supply of goods

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