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Supreme Court To Consider First Sale of Imports
Animaether passes along a legal tale that "doesn't involve the kind of cutting-edge issues that copyright lawyers usually grapple with in the digital age [and] sounds like the kind of lawsuit that should have been resolved 200 years ago," yet still "is very much a product of the Internet-driven global economy." "Can copyright owners assert rights over imported goods that have already been sold once? That is the issue before the Supreme Court in Costco Wholesale Corp v. Omega, S.A. (backstory here). What's at stake is the ability of resellers to offer legitimate, non-pirated versions of copyrighted goods, manufactured in foreign nations, to US consumers at prices that undercut those charged by the copyright holders."
The only free market in America is hookers and blow. Just kidding, there is no free market in America.
You decide to outsource your programmer in bengladore, your sale rep in ireland, your telephonic support in china ? Welllll we decide to buy our game from import from the global market. Too bad they undercut your local monopoly price. Global market baby. You outsource our job, we outsource our buying. Fair is fair.
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Of course not. When a corporation needs cheap labor/materials/lax laws/no taxes, then "Free Trade" is what makes the world go round.
If you wish to engage in a little arbitrage of your own, then "grey market" is about the most polite term. It is Vital to uphold Safety Standards and Preserve Market Stability, after all...
It's even nastier than that, in some cases, because some "real and tangible" property is now complex enough to enforce(against all but extremely sophisticated individuals) its own rules about use.
CSS is pitifully weak; but it was perhaps the first demonstration of this concept that gained huge market traction. Thanks to CSS licensing requirements, adding technologically enforced region coding became trivial.
As the cost of computing power continues to fall, and the number of devices that have embedded firmware and/or unique serial numbers continues to increase, there is virtually no area of "real property" over which the DMCA and copyright law will not eventually exert de facto control.
If ever there was a rationale for "misuse of copyright", this is it.
Actually you're right. Contraband is the perfect example, the epitome, of the free market. Totally unregulated.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Tesco (think British Wal-mart) was legal purchasing Levi's jeans in Europe from wholesalers, and then reselling them in the UK for lower price than Levi's wanted them sold there. Levi's sued them, and won. We can only hope the US Supreme Court sees things differently.
"Free market" is an oxymoron in the first place (when taken to the logical extreme of "totally unregulated", anyways). It's like asking what basketball would be like without any rules; it wouldn't be basketball. Without property rights, and contract enforcement, and currency, the forces of supply and demand still exist but can't develop into anything like the byzantine sophistication of Wall Street. So you can't just wish all the complexities away. This case is ultimately about a conflict of property rights - ownership of intellectual property vs ownership of the media holding copies of the intellectual property.
Want to know what the copyright is really being asserted on? Here's a picture of the back of an Omega Seamaster watch, the article in question. (No affiliation with the site, just what Google turned up first). Omega isn't asserting copyright on their main logo; they've been using it for over a century. Also, it's the Greek letter omega, not exactly a highly stylized and unique design. They aren't asserting copyright on the Seamaster seahorse that dominates the back, though you'd think that desgin qualifies as the best example of artistic authorship on the watch. Omega has been making Seamasters for about 60 years, so I would think that image could still be copyrighted. But that's not what Omega is claiming infringement on either.
The artwork Omega is enforcing a copyright on is that pattern of circles with an omega in it, just to the right of the pronounced Omega logo and above the "825" in the linked picture. That little doodle is about 0.5 centimeters in diameter, and apparently Omega is arguing that when you buy an Omega Seamaster, you are buying an authorized reproduction of that triumph of human artistic endeavor for the agreed-upon price of two thousand dollars. Omega just happens to be so generous as to frame your purchase with a diving watch.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."