Supreme Court rules against publisher on copyright protections

I first mentioned this case back in October, the Supreme Court has now ruled. In short: a Thai national came to the US to get a college education, found that the price of textbooks was insanely high. The same textbooks are offered in Thailand for far less. So he had his family send him textbooks from Thailand. Then he had them send *more* textbooks from Thailand, which he then sold for a profit in the US. The textbook publishers claimed that he was violating their copyright by reselling stuff he bought legally. It has long been accepted that Americans can resell stuff they bought… so long as what they bought was made in the US. But until this case came up, many people – myself included – had been unaware that there was even a hint that you were not allowed to resell something you bought, if it was made outside the US.

Strangely, the Supreme Court ruled on the side of common sense here, in a  6-3 decision: if you bought it, you can resell it. This has a few implications:

1) Books, obviously. Why buy the “American market edition” if a foreign edition is vastly cheaper?

2) Ipods, Ipads, other electronics: Americans get to pay Full Price, yet Chinese and such pay dirt cheap prices. Now, either that means that Apple really can make a profit off of an ipad that costs (handwave) fifty bucks… or Apple loses money on these sales and makes up for it via the high American prices. In other words, American consumers are subsidizing third-world consumers. In either event, it’s safe to assume that there will not be people scooping up large numbers of cheapo Ipads and such from the dirt-world markets and reselling at a substantial markup in the US market (but still substantially cheaper than MSRP). The end result of *that* will be:

A) Either the foreign prices will skyrocket to prevent that

B) US prices will plummet

C) The foreign versions will be made fundamentally different from US versions (Chinese language only, say)

3) Drugs. How many times have we heard about an American who needs  drugs only to find that the American-available drug costs several orders of magnitude more than the exact same drug available just across the border? (such as HERE, where a $100 scorpion anti venom dose was marked up by a factor of 390 for the US market) While I have no doubt that there are a passel of laws and regulations about importing and reselling drugs, I would also have no doubt that someone – probably many someones – are going to try to use this ruling to find a workaround to allow Americans to buy much needed medicines for roughly the sort of prices the rest of the world pays. And why not? It’s about time the US stopped subsidizing everyone else.