Last October, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. where petitioner, Kirtsaeng earned a profit of $100,000 by buying low cost Thai manufactured textbooks in Thailand and selling them over the internet in the U.S. John Wiley sued on copyright grounds and Kirtsaeng proferred the U.S. first sale doctrine as a defense. While we await the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether the first sale doctrine applies to materials manufactured outside of the U.S., Kevin Smith, in his excellent blog, Scholarly Communication @ Duke (http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm), has noticed what may be evidence of a growing hostility to the first sale doctrine among American publishers.
AALL members were alerted to Kirtsaeng at the terrific program, Hot Topics in Copyright for Librarians, at the AALL Annual Conference in Boston last summer. SCOTUSblog’s Kirtsaeng page links to many of the merit and amicus briefs.
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