In diesem Beitrag wird auf den Artikel von EDUARDO PORTER aus der Printausgabe der New York Times vom 27. März 2013 verwiesen, der auf der Seite B1 der New Yorker Ausgabe unter dem Titel "In a Ruling, The Legacy Of Betamax" erschien.
Die Online-Version dieses Artikels ist kostenfrei seit dem 26. März unter der Überschrift Copyright Ruling Rings With Echo of Betamax einzusehen.
Der Fall:
In a 6-to-3 decision, the court took sides with Supap Kirtsaeng, a Thai math student at Cornell who generated roughly $ 9,000 in revenue reselling in the United States cheap textbooks that his friends and relatives sent from Thailand.
John Wiley & Sons had argued that Mr. Kirtsaeng was infringing on its copyright by importing the books without permission. The publisher said this short-circuited its ability to segment markets by price — selling the books more expensively to American students than to poorer Thai students who could otherwise not afford them.
Einige der Reaktionen, die dieser Artikel zitiert:
— “The decision is a major victory for American consumers because it allows them to shop worldwide for their copyrighted content,” wrote Gary Shapiro, the chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association. “If the reasoning extended to pharmaceuticals, for example, Americans would no longer be the chumps who pay the highest prices in the world simply because they’re not allowed to shop overseas where prices are lower.”
— “Software authors will have little incentive to price their programs for foreign markets if they can simply be resold in the United States, and thereby undercut the price of the domestic version,” said the Business Software Alliance in a brief to the court. “Foreign consumers will be deprived of a product that would be useful to them and authors will have fewer resources to innovate for both domestic and foreign markets.”
— Besides cheap textbooks on Craigslist and e-Bay, the decision will probably bring a bunch of imports to the aisles of Target and Costco, said Keith Kupferschmid, vice president for intellectual property policy and enforcement at the Software and Information Industry Association.
—
“The first potential losers are the students and educators around the world who lose access to American educational materials,” said Tom Allen, head of the Association of American Publishers.
Interessant in diesem Zusammenhang der Hinweis auf die Plattfom ReDigi auf der bislang digitale Inhalte als eine Art "second-hand-Angebot" weiterverkauft wurden. Wie lange noch? Auch hierzu steht noch eine Gerichtsentscheidung aus. Dem Ansinnen von Capital Records, diese Seite sofort zu schliessen, haben die Gerichte jedenfalls bislang nicht entsprochen.