Re: Re: concern at copyright ruling

On 3/21/13, josephHarris <joe9438-/[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The report I read says the Thai student, while in the US, advertised the
> books, and had his family in Thailand drop ship them to the buyer. The
> money difference was such that all the costs left a profit at a price
> below that i n the US. In effect the student never owned them, and was
> actually running a business for profit with effectively new books, in
> defiance of a copyright restriction [which must, in my opinion, be a
> right if the US Constitutional copyright entitlement is truly exclusive].

Can't see as that really makes a difference. Whether he sold them
before he bought them or after, he (or his agents) nonetheless owned
them for a period of time between them being sold and them being sent
on to the people in the USA. It's the same principle as typing in
http://amazon.de and logging in with my Amazon.com user info to order
a DVD only available in Germany. He could have bought them first, THEN
advertised and taken money for them, THEN shipped them and it wouldn't
have made any difference in terms of the final result.

> The majority assumed this was a matter of profit motive [in any case a
> requirement under company law], but it is likely something else. WIPO
> has long been encouraging getting western education books to poorer
> countries at special concessions - mostly price, of course. This would
> only be possible with regional licencing, the very thing the justices
> have weakened. Judge Chin, in the Google Book Agreement case, was more
> sensitive to international implications and consequences; part of the
> reason the case is unresolved nearly five years in.

It's not exactly a new issue. Media producers have long understood
that, in order to make sales to places with much lower per-capita
income, it had to price its products lower. This wasn't such a big
deal in the days before the Internet, but even back when they
introduced DVDs the studios saw the problem looming. That's why they
implemented that asinine, poorly-thought-out system of regional
countermeasures--which consumers promptly ignored, thanks to the
prevalence of region-free DVD players. Restraint of trade through
means technological--and thanks to the DMCA, technically illegal to
crack. (Like that ever stopped anyone.)

It's hard to see how this can be solved in a way that doesn't, as I
noted elsewhere, encourage publishers to move production overseas to
try to kill the second-hand market. We KNOW how much publishers in any
medium hate second-hand sales. That's why video game publishers are
slapping obnoxious DRM on their products (see the recent SimCity
debacle), so that people can't resell what they buy. I have a hard
time believing a lot of book publishers wouldn't take advantage of any
means necessary to require people to buy new only.

-- 
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