Supreme Court To Hear First Sale Doctrine Case 242
Registered Coward v2 writes "The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a case to determine how copyright law and the doctrine of first sale applies to copyrighted works bought overseas, then imported to the U.S. and then re-sold. The case involves a foreign student who imported textbooks from Asia and the resold them in the U.S. to help fund his education. He was sued by the publisher, lost, and was ordered to pay $600,000 in damages. Now SCOTUS gets to weigh in on the issue. 'The idea -- upheld by the Supreme Court since 1908 -- is that once a copyright holder legally sells a product initially, the ownership claim is then exhausted, giving the buyer the power to resell, destroy, donate, whatever. It's a limited idea -- involving only a buyer's distribution right, not the power to reproduce that DVD or designer dress for sale. ... The tricky part is whether that first-sale doctrine applies to material both manufactured and first purchased outside the United States. Federal law gives that authority to a purchaser's work "lawfully made under this title." Does "this title" apply to any copyrighted work — whether manufactured all or in part in the United States and around the world?"
Re:Constitution is NOT a living document (Score:4, Informative)
The Constituion contains the mechanism for amending it.
It's not supposed to be done by executive order, a simple majority vote in Congress, or judicial fiat.
Re:could mean the death of us manufacturing (Score:4, Informative)
Why Honda's are made in the USA. it is fords, GM's and such that are made in mexico and shipped here.
Honda, Toyota, Nissan all manufacture more cars in the USA than Ford or GM do.
Re:Easy answer.. (Score:5, Informative)
(a) Infringing Importation or Exportation.— [cornell.edu]
(1) Importation.—
Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501.
Re:Constitution is NOT a living document (Score:5, Informative)
What you are implying is that they would be ok with any court or single person in congress having the power of their own persuasion and personal conviction to arbitrarily make a ruling because of his own interpretation. Pretty soon every judge has their own interpretation and as you might imagine this can lead to overwhelming chaos.
And that's exactly right. I don't see the problem here. I do see your misunderstanding, though.
The founders saw that no single set of laws could apply actual justice to every case. Mitigating circumstances and changing technologies had caused "overwhelming chaos" even 200 years ago. When they laid out the framework for the American government, they separated interpretation from legislation intentionally, so the courts could decide how (or if) the slowly-changing laws could apply to each case. Ideally, every case would follow a completely independent interpretation of the rules. For efficiency, though, American courts often follow precedent if the judges feel the circumstances haven't significantly changed since the precedent was set.
Every court can have their own opinion, and they very often do. Each state, county, and municipality can have their own interpretations of the law, which should coincide with the community's collective morality. When there's a significant disagreement, the case can be taken to a higher court for a more authoritative judgement, ultimately even arriving at the Supreme Court Of The United States, whose interpretations can override everything else in the nation.
Despite today's global culture, it is important to remember that humans only naturally compare their behavior to those physically around them. Local groups develop their own morality, and their local laws and customs reflect that. Why should their courts reflect an arbitrary morality from some other group a thousand miles away? We may as well declare tomorrow that America is under strict Muslim rule, and all courts must refer to the Qu'ran for legal guidance.
Re:Constitution is NOT a living document (Score:5, Informative)
You have to understand that there is no way for the constitution to be "as is". No-one - including constitutional originalists - thinks that that is possible. The process of interpretation necessarily involves information that does not come from the constitutional document itself, and that is a role of judges - to interpret the statute in order to determine what it means in a limitless array of situations. Far from being a criticism your statement "well I interpret this to mean that so I am ruling X" is in fact the right and proper function of a judge.
The opposing view to the living document school of thought is not that no information external to the document can be used; that idea is intellectually moribund, as is apparent the moment you attempt the exercise. The opposing view is constitutional originalism, which looks outside the document just as much as do living-document jurists. The difference is where they look: instead of looking at the prevailing circumstances today and what the meaning of the words would be if enacted today they look at the circumstances at the time of enactment and what (in the judge's interpretation, for the judge is interpreting things just as much here) the words would have meant at the time. It is important to bear in mind that this does not normally have anything to do with what the authors of the constitution wanted the constitution to say or meant for it to say. The question is what it would generally have been understood to have meant at the time.
Personally I tend to lean toward a constitutional originalist view. It must be accepted, however, that there are considerable problems with it. The living document school grew up in large part because a constitution interpreted in line with the values that were held 200 years ago is often irrelevant or useless. Advances in technology mean that checks on privacy interpreted as they were understood in the 18th century can be completely impotent. Similarly a clause guaranteeing due process is of little comfort if all it guarantees is the quality of due process that was accepted in 1790. There is also to my mind a clear contradiction in the commonly held position that in relation to rights the constitution grants nothing that would not have been expected in the eighteenth century, but that the second amendment grants the right to own any weapon whenever devised.