In this case a book publisher (John Wiley) went to court against a United States graduate student (Supap Kirtsaeng) who is from another country. Kirtsaeng was receiving cheaper and almost identical copies of books being sent to her from her home country of Thailand and then selling them for a profit in the United States. This has been appealed to the United State Supreme Court and a decision is expected by June. It is also important to note that Kirtsaeng sold about $900,000 of books making a $100,000 profit which brings me to the argument of this blog post.
Earlier this week in class we had been arguing if sharing media depended on the intention of the person sharing and if the number of shared copies factored into the law. As I read this case I see a parallel: what is the limit on re-selling books? I know that I, along with many students re-sell their textbooks online but what is the limit to that? In the case of sharing Goldstein discusses in his book Copyright Highway that the sharing of Xerox copies if used to give to other Supreme Court justices was ok but if used in a library it is not acceptable. This leads me to believe that if something is shared for a purely un-profitable endeavor and to a limited amount of people it is ok.
Relating this to the Kirtsaeng v John Wiley court case I believe it’s quite similar. If the graduate student simply bought her books in her home country and used them in the United States there wouldn’t me a problem. However instead she made a profit off of another authors work with commercial intentions.
This is a very touchy subject indeed, which explains why it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The issue I would see with this is if the distributor is in violation of copyright law. That is, are the copies from Thailand illegitimate copies of the work in question? If that is the case, then the plaintiff would most certainly be correct in this case. I would not be surprised if this is true. China industry is notoriously guilty for disregarding copyrights and ownership, so it would not surprise me that the rest of the southeast Asian region would be following this example.