Copyright Owners Have Other Legal Strategies To Protect Themselves

Copyright Violations

The Supreme Court's recent  Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons ruling  affecting first-sale doctrine and its legal ramifications Re intellectual property (IP) lends itself tangent to a previous topic A Legal Used Ebook Market? Who Would This Screw the Most? 

The ruling essentially says its ok for someone to legally purchase books cheaper overseas, then import and resell them in this country without the copyright holder's permission.

But, as we will discover, other legal strategies exist to compensate for copyright's weaknesses.

Hopefully this will add more intelligencia to the 'A Legal Used Ebook Market? Who would This Screw the Most? post.

From Lisa Shuchman  writing for Law.com:

Next Moves for IP Law after SCOTUS First-Sale Ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court's Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons ruling that a legally obtained copyrighted work can be imported into the U.S. and resold without permission from the copyright owner, even if it was manufactured and sold overseas, will have broad legal ramifications going forward, intellectual property attorneys say.

Industries that rely on copyright protection, such as book publishers, film and television companies, and software publishers, will begin operating differently. Lawyers will start testing alternative legal strategies that could give their clients the protections they thought they had under copyright law. Congress may try to pass new legislation to grant those protections. Meanwhile, other forms of intellectual property protection could be affected by the Court's ruling, as could U.S. international trade negotiations.

"This decision will have a large impact on law and business," said Shari Mulrooney Wollman, co-chair of the intellectual property practice at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.

The 6-3 decision was prompted by a case involving Supap Kirtsaeng, a Thai student who imported lower-priced textbooks from Thailand and resold them in the U.S. to help pay for his studies at Cornell University and the University of Southern California. Textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons sued, saying Kirtsaeng's unauthorized importation and sale of its books amounted to copyright infringement, and that the "first-sale" doctrine — under which people who buy something may resell it without permission — does not apply because the books were produced overseas for sale overseas.

"This was the publishing industry's understanding of the law for at least three decades," said Anderson Duff, an attorney with Wolf Greenfield. "Everyone is pretty stunned."

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Intellectual Property: Removal of Masterpieces from the Public Domain - Good or Bad Idea?

As intellectuals (or wise old farts) realize, the U.S. Supreme Court is correct in its rulings maybe half the time :)

Well they just upheld a sweeping congressional amendment to the U.S. Copyright Act that "restored" copyright in works including some of the world’s most beloved masterpieces.

This post has some interesting history on the beginnings of copyright law.

These details from the global law practice of Hogan Lovells through http://www.lexology.com/:

The fight for Peter and the Wolf: U.S. Supreme Court upholds the removal of masterpieces from the public domain

USA

January 27 2012

United States Supreme Court, Decision of 18 January 2012, No. 10-545, Golan v. Holder

In a 6-2 vote, the United States Supreme Court upheld a sweeping congressional amendment to the U.S. Copyright Act that "restored" copyright in works including some of the world’s most beloved masterpieces.

Countless works, including Pablo Picasso’s La Guernica, Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, were once in the public domain in the United States but have since had their copyright restored by a congressional amendment to the U.S. Copyright Act. This amendment and its far-reaching impact on those whose work depends on the free, unrestricted use of materials in the public domain were at the heart of a decade-long dispute in Golan v. Holder. The case reached its final conclusion on January 18, 2012 by a 6-2 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The genesis of the case reaches back to 1886, when the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was signed into force. The Convention, which now includes 165 contracting parties, established an international copyright system based on mutual recognition of copyright between member states. The United States did not accede to the Convention until 1988 when Congress enacted the Berne Convention Implementation Act, which went into effect on March 1, 1989. At that time, Congress expressly declined to implement Article 18 of the Convention, which effectively required copyright restoration for works of foreign authorship still under copyright in their source country but never copyrighted in the United States.

A few years later, Congress reversed its position. As part of multilateral trade negotiations in connection with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the United States agreed to implement Article 18, incorporating it as §514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA). Section 514 amended the U.S. Copyright Act to extend copyrights to foreign works (first published between 1923 and March 1, 1989) for the term of protection those works would have been granted had they been copyrighted in the United States in the first place.

Effective January 1, 1996, a large number of foreign works, including works such as Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf once freely performed by school orchestras like the one led by Lawrence Golan, the named petitioner in Golan v. Holder, had their copyright restored in the United States. High and, in certain cases, prohibitive permission fees imposed for the use of such newly copyrighted works soon followed – a circumstance denounced by the Golan dissent, "If a school orchestra or other nonprofit organization cannot afford the new charges…They will have to do without – aggravating the already serious problem of cultural education in the United States."

The Golan petitioners challenged the constitutionality of §514 of the URAA. They argued that: (1) §514 exceeded the authority granted by the Copyright Clause of the Constitution, which empowers Congress: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors…the exclusive Right to their…Writings." Congress, they contended, had set the “limited time” of copyright for pre-March 1, 1989 foreign works at zero years when it previously denied those works copyright protection, and nothing in the Copyright Clause authorizes Congress to restore that limited term once the works were allowed to fall into the public domain; (2) the removal of public domain works abridged their pre-existing First Amendment right to use those works freely for their expression; and (3) copyrighting works created decades before does not promote the creation of new works.

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Publishing Piracy Intrigue: China Stepping on Japan Copyrights...Oh, and Apple is Bad Boy Too!

Not only is China violating some of Japan's copyrights through it's huge internet search beast Baidu (on it's Baidu library)...but, Apple iPad is also stomping all over portions of Japanese copyrighted material.

And guess what? The Chinese Baidu search beast has made a successful effort at policing it's copyright infringements whereas Apple has NOT! Interesting, no?

This intriguing story unfolds on the Japan & China 'Realtime' Report blogs of the Wall Street Journal:

The publishing business may be in the throes of the unknown, but one thing is for sure: Japanese publishing giants aren’t afraid to pick up the sword – or pen — in the name of copyright protection.

The consortium of four Japanese publishing associations that joined forces to take on Apple Inc. has expanded the reach of their sword to China. The associations requested Baidu, the beast of Internet search in China, to take steps to prevent illegal uploads of copyrighted material on “Baidu Library.” In the absence of effective policing and preventive tactics pirated versions of Japanese manga, anime and novels have run rampant on the free document-sharing service where users can upload and surf files for free, according to a joint press release on Monday. It was signed by the Japan Book Publishers Association, the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan and the Digital Comic Association.

“Authors and publishers have made removal requests to Baidu each time the existence of these ‘digital bootlegs’ is discovered, but there is no end to the illegal uploading of data and the cat-and-mouse-game continues,” said the statement, adding that “Baidu bears grave responsibility for this problem.”

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