What happened to "free trade"? I see no difference between buying something in country A and selling it in country B and buying and selling within the borders of country A.
As borders continue to fade away, restrictions on importation will become restrictions on first sale rights. So I really draw no distinction, personally.
But I'm not objective. For me segmenting (like DVD zones) always looked like and artificial way to milk more cash out of people.
This hypothesis is an extreme case, but it shows a mechanism how price discrimination can be welfare-increasing. That there can be tradeoffs between first-sale freedoms and societal wealth. (Because first-sale restrictions -- tying tickets to names, like a contract -- is what keeps secondary markets from equalizing airline fares).
http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
ToC: http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
You could email the author and ask him, he seems to know.
I don't see any good reason for limiting secondary sales that doesn't reek of protectionism.
This means that local companies in small and developing countries have enormous opportunities they did not have in the past. But multinationals that dump goods into these markets in the hope of securing market share for the future (when the markets actually become profitable for them) are a huge hurdle.
I see no problem with the scenario you described outside of a few select industries. For example, pharma is problematic, but that market is so screwed up it is hardly worth talking about (publicly funded research being turned into private profits, etc.).
Personally, I would rather see IP exceptions built into treaties. For example, if you refuse to sell product A in country B, then other companies can ignore your patents as long as they only sell in country B, etc.
And you don't have to ask the publisher. After all, if you buy socks or a piece of rubber you don't ask the manufacturer if you want it to pass some borders, do you?
That's how real world goods work. And book is a real world thing.
Obviously the real target of the publishers' suits is cheaper versions of books (mainly textbooks). But I don't see how the arguments they're making can be limited to that case, and wouldn't also sweep up a whole bunch of other reasonably common cases where people sell books in one country that they bought in another country. Some examples: estate sales of people who grew up in one country and died in another one; resale of books bought on trips; small-scale independent importation and sale of books that were never published in the U.S. (e.g. novels in the original French/German/etc.). Heck, as an American expat in Denmark, I fairly routinely sell U.S.-bought books in Denmark or vice versa, depending on where they happen to be at a given time and how full my suitcase is.
The more suspicious part of me suspects that, while parallel importation of cheap textbooks is their main target, they wouldn't really mind an outcome that banned those other resales, either, and looked more like a region-coding system. For example, one easy-ish thing Half-Priced Books could do to keep safe would be to filter by ISBN, only stocking books with ISBNs indicating US publication. That'd have some false positives (some foreign-published books are imported with the publisher's blessing), but it'd be more feasible than attempting to determine on a case-by-case basis whether a particular book had undergone an authorized domestic first sale.
An alternate statutory fix that targets only the narrower case could be to legislate: 1) resale of any lawfully owned book in the U.S. is legal, regardless of where it was first sold; but 2) large-scale [for suitable definition] parallel importation with commercial intent is separately prohibited.
If their arguments applied solely to bulk parallel importation, that would be another matter. That's the "narrower" legislative fix that I proposed above: to ban the act of bulk commercial importation itself, rather than doing it in a roundabout way via resale restrictions.