In a global economy, restrictions on parallel importation are destructive and backward.
What happened to "free trade"? I see no difference between buying something in country A and selling it in country B and buying and selling within the borders of country A.
As borders continue to fade away, restrictions on importation will become restrictions on first sale rights. So I really draw no distinction, personally.
Recognize that your position may have the following implication: if the producer cannot segment prices regionally, they may choose to charge the US price globally - in this case they lose the marginal sales in poorer countries, and customers in poorer countries lose access to the product. No one wins in this scenario.
I read a hypothesis that airlines would be unsustainable without price discrimination. That is: if tickets were uniformly priced, there is no price at which ticket sales (demand) would exceed fixed costs. Without gouging business travelers, there wouldn't be enough revenue to subsidize the
pleasure travelers, who would stop flying because they couldn't afford unsubsidized fares. And the industry would fail.
This hypothesis is an extreme case, but it shows a mechanism how price discrimination can be welfare-increasing. That there can be tradeoffs between first-sale freedoms and societal wealth. (Because first-sale restrictions -- tying tickets to names, like a contract -- is what keeps secondary markets from equalizing airline fares).
They may. Or they could drop the prices just enough that importing charges would make up the difference. It's just rules of the game. If they change, adapt your business model or go bust.
But I'm not objective. For me segmenting (like DVD zones) always looked like and artificial way to milk more cash out of people.
No, local competitors win out over multinationals. This is better in my opinion. Human capital and knowledge are more mobile than ever, and should be even more mobile (why can we import goods freely but importation of labor is tightly restricted?).
This means that local companies in small and developing countries have enormous opportunities they did not have in the past. But multinationals that dump goods into these markets in the hope of securing market share for the future (when the markets actually become profitable for them) are a huge hurdle.
I see no problem with the scenario you described outside of a few select industries. For example, pharma is problematic, but that market is so screwed up it is hardly worth talking about (publicly funded research being turned into private profits, etc.).
Personally, I would rather see IP exceptions built into treaties. For example, if you refuse to sell product A in country B, then other companies can ignore your patents as long as they only sell in country B, etc.
"Free trade", despite the dishonest propaganda, has always been about freedom for companies, not consumers or workers. When was the last time you heard a free trade proponent advocate for unrestricted freedom of movement for workers across borders, similar to that of capital?
The difference between that and this lawsuit is that if I order an Oreilly book from the Phillipines via Amazon or something such to have it delivered to me in the USA for X price, it is legal because Amazon has been granted permission from Oreilly to be a distributor of their media overseas. In this lawsuit this is not the case.
I call bullshit on this. You can order a book from any store in the world, they should deliver it to you if economically viable, and then you can resell it if no longer need for the price you and your buyer consider fair.
And you don't have to ask the publisher. After all, if you buy socks or a piece of rubber you don't ask the manufacturer if you want it to pass some borders, do you?
That's how real world goods work. And book is a real world thing.
Agreed. First thing I thought of: Isn't this how places like half priced books and the paperback exchange work? I'm pretty sure neither is paying publisher rights to resell the books people bring in.
Half Price Books is a used bookseller. The difference between a used book seller and a parallel importation scheme is that the used book seller doesn't attempt to subvert the publisher's overseas price breaks to stock their warehouse.
Under the theory in these suits, wouldn't Half-Priced Books have to actually vet their inventory to ensure they only sell books that have undergone a proper domestic first sale authorized by the publisher? It doesn't seem to be enough that Half-Priced Books themselves refrains from engaging in a parallel-import scheme. The strong version of the argument, at least, seems to be arguing that the first-sale doctrine doesn't apply at all to books that were imported without the publisher's consent. So not only would parallel importation violate a copyright holder's rights, but so would subsequent domestic resale of any such book. So e.g., if I sold Half-Priced Books a book I bought in Europe (which I've done), and they resold it, both those sales would be illicit, absent publisher consent.
Obviously the real target of the publishers' suits is cheaper versions of books (mainly textbooks). But I don't see how the arguments they're making can be limited to that case, and wouldn't also sweep up a whole bunch of other reasonably common cases where people sell books in one country that they bought in another country. Some examples: estate sales of people who grew up in one country and died in another one; resale of books bought on trips; small-scale independent importation and sale of books that were never published in the U.S. (e.g. novels in the original French/German/etc.). Heck, as an American expat in Denmark, I fairly routinely sell U.S.-bought books in Denmark or vice versa, depending on where they happen to be at a given time and how full my suitcase is.
The more suspicious part of me suspects that, while parallel importation of cheap textbooks is their main target, they wouldn't really mind an outcome that banned those other resales, either, and looked more like a region-coding system. For example, one easy-ish thing Half-Priced Books could do to keep safe would be to filter by ISBN, only stocking books with ISBNs indicating US publication. That'd have some false positives (some foreign-published books are imported with the publisher's blessing), but it'd be more feasible than attempting to determine on a case-by-case basis whether a particular book had undergone an authorized domestic first sale.
An alternate statutory fix that targets only the narrower case could be to legislate: 1) resale of any lawfully owned book in the U.S. is legal, regardless of where it was first sold; but 2) large-scale [for suitable definition] parallel importation with commercial intent is separately prohibited.
HPB buys books from the first-sellers, so someone pays the appropriate price on the books. HPB doesn't care who. They key distinction is that their business isn't structured around circumventing treaty-supported geography-based pricing on physical products.
Some of their inventory might not have had anyone paying the appropriate price, though. If I buy a book in France (or the Philippines), and resell it to a Half-Priced Books in Texas, under the theory in these suits (as I read it) HPB would be violating the copyright-holder's rights if they resold it, because that book never had a proper first sale in the US, and was not imported with authorization of the publisher.
My point is that their legal arguments in this case aren't limited to bulk importation, but are arguing that there exists no first-sale right at all for books that didn't undergo that initial authorized domestic "first sale", regardless of why, e.g. whether it was one book imported by a tourist who bought it in France.
If their arguments applied solely to bulk parallel importation, that would be another matter. That's the "narrower" legislative fix that I proposed above: to ban the act of bulk commercial importation itself, rather than doing it in a roundabout way via resale restrictions.
What happened to "free trade"? I see no difference between buying something in country A and selling it in country B and buying and selling within the borders of country A.
As borders continue to fade away, restrictions on importation will become restrictions on first sale rights. So I really draw no distinction, personally.