Summary: this Thai student in the US set up a grey-market channel for selling textbooks made in Thailand to students in the US. His family bought the books for him at retail and shipped them here where Supap was able to undercut prices and make a pretty good profit.
On the one hand, he was was setting up a business with a million-dollar revenue stream, which I suppose highlights the airport-coffeeshop prices textbook publishers are extorting from students. On the other hand, the “first sale doctrine” could start to be eroded by this case, possibly leading to legal limitations on what you can do with that DVD that you never watch anymore.
The third aspect to this case bears on foreign markets: if publishers (broadly including media as well) cannot be confident that their material will stay in, say, India rather than feed the US grey market, the Indians may simply not be afforded access.
What do the legal minds and extremists here have to say about this case?
Extremists? not sure what you mean by that but difficult to see what the guy has done wrong. He bought genuine items, imported and sold them on. Good for him. The publisher still gets paid their due.
The “first sale doctrine” seems reasonable to me as it stands and I’d be loathed to see it tampered with or weakened.
Of course digital distribution is the real elephant in the room for the publisher. They have to consider that a victory in stopping those cheaper imports is just going to drive people to illicit electronic copies far sooner.
A friend of mine going to JC paid almost $200.00 for a textbook. To be used for 3 months or so. Re-sell value? $50.00. And the book has to be in almost perfect condition.
These kids need a break!
And that is what I mean by “airport-coffeeshop prices”. There seems to be some sort of cabal involving textbook publishers and schools to keep the prices for these things off the map. Perhaps publishing houses rely on these profits in particular to offset the cost of some of their other less lucrative ventures.
But the underlying point is the first sale doctrine. Perhaps Kirtsaeng could reasonably be seen as obtaining this stuff at effective wholesale and thus was the practical first seller, required to pay royalties to the publisher (the books were marked not-for-sale-in-US or something like that), would a decision against him have any impact on importers or other second-hand sellers?
It looks a little like the publishing industry is trying to tighten their grip on copyrighted material. Will they eventually over stress the whole market, driving some kind of reform that works against them?
And how many other rhetorical questions can I get away with?
Textbooks really aren’t that profitable. They are sold in tiny, tiny numbers, so the markup on them has to be high. I don’t think the foreign market thing is a worry; anyone selling books in mass quantities, like the guy in the OP, is going to get sued.