Student Charged For Re-selling Textbooks

AstroPhilosopher writes "The U.S. Supreme Court will hear an appeal from a Thai student who was fined $600,000 for re-selling textbooks. Trying to make ends meet, the student had family members in Thailand mail him textbooks that were made and purchased abroad, which he then resold in the U.S. It's a method many retailers practice every day. 'Discount sellers like Costco and Target and Internet giants eBay and Amazon help form an estimated $63 billion annual market for goods that are purchased abroad, then imported and resold without the permission of the manufacturer. The U.S.-based sellers, and consumers, benefit from the common practice of manufacturers to price items more cheaply abroad than in the United States. This phenomenon is sometimes called a parallel market or grey market.'"

Comments

Re:Allow Me to Rephrase the Problem

[eldavojohn]

Wow you're really quite the shill. You work for these people? A few years ago the Textbook as.... I mean, Publishers tried to make selling used books to students illegal. I'm curious to see how far backwards you can bend to justify that as being "fine and dandy" marketing.

So, this is called a strawman argument where I postulate that publishers are faced with a conundrum in trying to get their works out to third world countries and you open up with making me look like someone who says that resale of textbooks should not be allowed. Well done, I love the quality of discourse and discussion on this site!

Here's a thought: Maybe the textbook publishers should offer TWO copies of their books, just like fiction publishers do: One that is hardcover. And one that is paperbook, with lower-quality paper/binding, but costs 1/3rd to 1/4th as much. (Then we'd not need to import that paperback from India because it would be on U.S. shelves.)

You really failed to even read or comprehend the issue here. The insanity of publishers pricing in the United States is such that 1/3 or 1/4 the cost is nowhere near enough to market it in India! Furthermore, the book's value is in the words. The binding and quality is basically moot, just ask the people who are embracing ebooks at more cost than dead tree books. Why do you (continually) fail to engage me in any meaningful way on this discussion?

Now, carry on with your ad hominem attacks about how I'm a shill ...

Re:I Give Up

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what's broken with slashdot. Slashdot can only function so long as the majority have brains. This inversion occurred years ago. As a result, slashdot no longer functions simply because the readership and especially the majority of moderators are seemingly too stupid to follow extremely simple instructions on how and what they are supposed to moderate. Now the majority of users know little about anything, clearly can not rationally nor critically evaluate new knowledge, and will take painful steps to ensure they don't learn new information. After all, if they don't already know it, or their incorrect variation of the facts doesn't match, then its automatically and immediately wrong.

Welcome to a world with the Entitled Generation. As usual, they fuck everything up.