Fangtaku
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2012
- Messages
- 925
Here's where my roommate found the article, the original source is linked at the bottom: ONTD-Political
Basically, copyright holders have "right of first sale" on goods they produce. That means they can authorize who can and can't sell it. After it's bought, then you own it, and can do whatever you want with it. Like sell it to someone else.
What this case involves, is that some college guy in the US (originally from Thailand) realized that his textbooks were cheaper in Thailand than in the US. So he had his family buy what had to have been tons of books, send them to him in the US, and he turned around and sold them for a profit.
So what they want to do, is basically make it so that instead of just "first sale", you would have to get the copyright holder's permission to resell their products, IF it's made outside the US. And this includes BOTH imports and US products made overseas. Which means that all of our Japanese-made toys would be illegal to sell, unless we got permission. And it's even convoluted enough that you'd have to get permission for individual components. Which makes it more ridiculous.
There's a lot of large companies going against this, so I don't know what we can do other than get the word out, and raise our voices so that people hear that there's people against this, but I personally think we should do what we can to keep this stupid thing from passing into law.
Basically, copyright holders have "right of first sale" on goods they produce. That means they can authorize who can and can't sell it. After it's bought, then you own it, and can do whatever you want with it. Like sell it to someone else.
What this case involves, is that some college guy in the US (originally from Thailand) realized that his textbooks were cheaper in Thailand than in the US. So he had his family buy what had to have been tons of books, send them to him in the US, and he turned around and sold them for a profit.
So what they want to do, is basically make it so that instead of just "first sale", you would have to get the copyright holder's permission to resell their products, IF it's made outside the US. And this includes BOTH imports and US products made overseas. Which means that all of our Japanese-made toys would be illegal to sell, unless we got permission. And it's even convoluted enough that you'd have to get permission for individual components. Which makes it more ridiculous.
There's a lot of large companies going against this, so I don't know what we can do other than get the word out, and raise our voices so that people hear that there's people against this, but I personally think we should do what we can to keep this stupid thing from passing into law.