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How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

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Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#41

Post by gabemart »

debacle wrote: post #38
slapshot wrote: post #3

Good discussion of the same case here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706572 There's a lot of FUD ("they might" "a ruling could") in this article. The short version is that this case deals with the fact that the Copyright Act prohibits unlicensed copying _and_ importing of copyrighted goods.[1] It comes up because (just like in the textbook case), it behooves a lot of manufacturers to charge a high price in the…

> The price difference goes to cover things like research, writing, and other fixed costs that exist no matter how many marginal copies are sold. The price difference is market arbitrage designed to suck the largest profit out of a market. Pointing out research, or writing, or anything else, ignores the reality that if the production cost warrants a sale price of $x, charging $x * 5 or in some cases $x * 100 and usin…

>Pointing out research, or writing, or anything else, ignores the reality that if the production cost warrants a sale price of $x, charging $x * 5 or in some cases $x * 100 and using legal protections to do so is inherently greedy and immoral.

Why is, for example, a student discount, "inherently greedy and immoral"? I don't see why there's intrinsically any moral element to charging groups differently based on their willingness or ability to pay.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#42

Post by mseebach »

stonemetal wrote: post #36
mseebach wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a good economic analysis from the old thread: if the Court rules that publishers cannot prevent gray-market imports of textbooks that sell for $100 in the US but $20 in the Philippines, publishers aren't going to set the price to $20 in the US. They're just going to raise the price in the Philippines to $100 minus whatever it costs to ship from Manila to the US. Students in poor countries just get further s…

Or they could provide a better product for that market that made it naturally distasteful to the US market. Like a book written in the language of the land (The market for CS books written in Filipino should be relatively small in a non Filipino speaking countries). Why make them work when we could just legislate profits their way?

The issue is significantly more complex than "legislat[ing] profits their way".

It's very unlikely that the discounted overseas textbook market constitues a very large amount of profit. Indeed, it could certainly be seen as reasonable CSR project: "Let's sell our books at marginal cost+10% to poor asian students, but have legal make sure those copies can't cannibalise our domestic market". If it turns out legal was wrong, the response is more likely to be "though luck, the global price is now $100" instead of "drat, let's lower the US prices to $20".

Now, being nice, even charitable, should not be a ticket to get to write your own laws. But Wiley is unlikely to celebrate a ruling of global first sale doctrine by convening an editorial committee to produce a Filipino CS textbook (and a dozen other languages times a dozen other subjects), to then go and sell that at $20 there.

Also, on a tangent, as the lingua franca of CS is English, it's convenient to learn the subject in English. I was taught CS mostly in English, but one time where the teacher insisted on speaking Danish, it took me half the class to realize that oversætter (literally translator) was meant to describe a compiler.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#43

Post by gabemart »

debacle wrote: post #40
aviraldg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine? $200 (a figure I saw quoted somewhere for a single college coursebook) is more than the annual fees for some government-run colleges here (in India.)

If the market is fair but the price is wrong, the price will change. Creating fair markets should be the #1 goal of capitalism.

>If the market is fair but the price is wrong, the price will change.

You're assuming that a price that no-one in a developing country can afford is the same as a price that is "wrong". It's perfectly possible that a price that no-one in a developing country can afford is "right" from an economic perspective in that it's profit maximizing for the producer.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#44

Post by Zak »

tomp wrote: post #24
Zak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only question raised by this case is if you wanted to fly to Manila, buy 1,000 textbooks at the Philippines price and then sell them in the US at the US price, could the textbook manufacturer claim that you imported unlicensed goods into the US? Regardless of the consequences, it's surprising to me that anybody who doesn't earn money through regional copyright-based price discrimination thinks that it's proper fo…

Common sense says that the copyright holder shouldn't stop you and me from transfering goods from another country (where we are on vacation) to our home countries. It would be absurd that I would have to leave behind my iPod that I bought in Dubai or the magazine I bought in Vietnam. However, it's quite reasonable to prevent business import of goods from abroad. Then, you're basically preventing the producer from ass…

However, it's quite reasonable to prevent business import of goods from abroad.

Why is it reasonable? They aren't counterfeit. They weren't produced in violation of copyright. They aren't dangerous. They aren't stolen. The only reason to ban their import is to protect the copyright holder's business model.

Whether the business model is desirable or not is not the question. The question is whether it deserves explicit protection in law, and I believe it does not.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#45

Post by Zak »

dsr_ wrote: post #28
tomp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of solution do you propose?

Three plausible answers: 1. Remove the barriers. Drop import and export restrictions, drop punitive tariffs, reduce taxes; at the same time, make restrictive DRM and equivalents (copyright controlling imports, in the instant case) illegal. This will reduce production costs and reduce selling prices. Overall, standard of living will rise slightly where production costs are low and sink more dramatically where producti…

It's probably not necessary to ban DRM - just to legalize circumvention.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#46

Post by _delirium »

tomp wrote: post #24
Zak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only question raised by this case is if you wanted to fly to Manila, buy 1,000 textbooks at the Philippines price and then sell them in the US at the US price, could the textbook manufacturer claim that you imported unlicensed goods into the US? Regardless of the consequences, it's surprising to me that anybody who doesn't earn money through regional copyright-based price discrimination thinks that it's proper fo…

Common sense says that the copyright holder shouldn't stop you and me from transfering goods from another country (where we are on vacation) to our home countries. It would be absurd that I would have to leave behind my iPod that I bought in Dubai or the magazine I bought in Vietnam. However, it's quite reasonable to prevent business import of goods from abroad. Then, you're basically preventing the producer from ass…

If you mean there are sometimes reasons for import tariffs, then that might be true (it's a large debate in economics). I don't see why copyrighted goods should be treated specially, though. If a country wants an import tariff on books, just like on sugar or on steel, in order to maintain price differences, it should institute it directly, rather than via this roundabout copyright route.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#47

Post by antiterra »

slapshot wrote: post #3

Good discussion of the same case here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706572 There's a lot of FUD ("they might" "a ruling could") in this article. The short version is that this case deals with the fact that the Copyright Act prohibits unlicensed copying _and_ importing of copyrighted goods.[1] It comes up because (just like in the textbook case), it behooves a lot of manufacturers to charge a high price in the…

> The case deals only with the "gray market" importation question

This is incorrect. Did you read Omega? Did you read earlier Kirtsaeng or the Petition for Certiorari or even Wiley's response?

The core question is basically "what does 'made lawfully under this title' mean in relation to first sale?" The petitioner (the book importer) tried to apply first sale as a defense to the limitations on unauthorized importation. If first sale is invalid because "under this title" mean solely within the territory of the US, then the first sale is likely invalid in all such situations.

The court could rule that anything purchased in the US also gets 'first sale' protection as a matter of interpretation, or it might figure out how to rule so narrowly that the decision only applies to one scenario, but that's exactly the same "could" and "might" that you called FUD earlier.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#48

Post by jivatmanx »

slapshot wrote: post #3

Good discussion of the same case here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706572 There's a lot of FUD ("they might" "a ruling could") in this article. The short version is that this case deals with the fact that the Copyright Act prohibits unlicensed copying _and_ importing of copyrighted goods.[1] It comes up because (just like in the textbook case), it behooves a lot of manufacturers to charge a high price in the…

As far as I can tell, this does appear limited to international trade for business purposes. It's a new, very specific kind of import ban. Protectionism of a sort, but not really that scary.

Problem is, this new ban doesn't actually appear in the copyright act at all.

No, it's not terribly scary and Ebay isn't going to be shut down. But that doesn't mean that the courts should have a license to create a new law that simply and clearly didn't exist before.

And your conjecture that this prevents arbitrage is FUD, as there are numerous ways to version differentiate (simply change order of questions, localizations, etc) that do not require giving the government a gigantic new policing power.

Re: How a Supreme Court ruling may stop you from reselling just about anything

#49

Post by tomp »

_delirium wrote: post #46
tomp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common sense says that the copyright holder shouldn't stop you and me from transfering goods from another country (where we are on vacation) to our home countries. It would be absurd that I would have to leave behind my iPod that I bought in Dubai or the magazine I bought in Vietnam. However, it's quite reasonable to prevent business import of goods from abroad. Then, you're basically preventing the producer from ass…

If you mean there are sometimes reasons for import tariffs, then that might be true (it's a large debate in economics). I don't see why copyrighted goods should be treated specially, though. If a country wants an import tariff on books, just like on sugar or on steel, in order to maintain price differences, it should institute it directly, rather than via this roundabout copyright route.

Tariffs actually achieve just the opposite - it increases the cost of foreign imports. Also, it does it for everybody, also for authorized importers/resellers.

Well, sometimes there is hardly anything else but copyright that constitutes products (e.g. media, books). Personally, I would also enable the same kind of protection for trademarks (so that iPad could be sold for different price in West and elsewhere).

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