

9th Circuit Guts "First Sale" Rights - CoryOndrejka
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/if-you-buy-an-imported-watch-do-you-really-own-it.ars

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ck2
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.

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sabat
"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.

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jshen
how does costco fit into your model?

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rictic
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).

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ars
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.

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electromagnetic
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.

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code_duck
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.

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

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

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MartinCron
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.

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

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

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

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tzs
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.

~~~
_delirium
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?

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narrator
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".

~~~
dantheman
Yep, in other words it's bullshit.

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

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

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cma
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)).

