More Misplaced Hatred For The Used Games Market

from the learn-some-economics dept

I'm constantly amazed at the general cluelessness of the video gaming industry on basic economics concerning the concept of the first sale doctrine and the ability to resell a product. More than pretty much any other industry, the video game industry is vehemently against the idea of reselling used games. They've claimed that it defrauds the industry, that it hurts consumers (say what, now?) and that it "cheats developers." All of this is ridiculous and economically ignorant.

The latest to jump into the fray, as pointed out by Copysense, is some industry consultant who basically calls used games sales by Gamestop a version of money laundering:

It is time to for Gamestop to fess up and acknowledge their real business. Relative margins reveal Gamestop's actual business to be the collection and resale of used games. New game and accessory sales revenue may equal or exceed the used game revenue, but they do not come close to matching the profit. The stock of used games is financed by the very publishers who are being harmed by the market. They put up the risk capital to make and market the game and put the unit on the shelf. Publishers receive a one time, per unit fee for putting the game into the Gamestop system and are required to pay marketing development funds to Gamestop to have posters and other promotions in store. But Gamestop does not pay for the games, customers do. Gamestop only provides credit until the games are sold. The consumers' payment covers Gamestop's initial outlay, plus a profit. Because Gamestop pays on terms, the consumers' money is in the bank before Gamestop ever makes a payment on the new game units. If the consumers do not sufficiently cover the expense, Gamestop will call on the publishers for price adjustments and protection. While this business shows a profit with no downside risk, the entire retail side is merely a highly cost effective way of funding the used game inventory. To ensure return of the games, consumers who buy a games are bombarded with offers to turn them back in for credit. Each turned in game builds the used inventory, at no cost to Gamestop. When sold, the only person receiving the benefit, is Gamestop. When I put it this way . . . . I don't want to say it sounds like laundering, but . . . . . They take a game unit a publisher should get paid for, run it though a consumer, and turn into a game unit they can sell over, and over, and over, and over without compensation to the publisher.

Of course, all of this is based on faulty economic theory. They all seem to ignore the fact that a healthy resale market increases primary market sales, by making the primary sale more valuable. It's a pretty simple equation. If I can buy a $60 game, knowing that I can sell it back later, that reduces the risk and the real "cost" to me. That increases sales. Separately, a strong resale market has other secondary benefits, such as hooking people on series of video games, so that they're more interested in buying the "new" (full price) versions.

But, overall, what these gaming industry execs and consultants are whining about is that they just don't like a free market where they can't artificially inflate the market price of games even higher. The used market acts as a check on the primary market to keep it realistic. And, as a result of a more efficient market, you actually have a bigger market. Those who assume that demand is totally inelastic think this is bad, but they don't recognize that game buyers have choices, and one of those choices is not to buy games that are too expensive. It's not fraud and it's certainly not money laundering. It's called keeping a market healthy.

Filed Under: copyright, economics, first sale, video games

Legally Bought Some Books Abroad? Sell Them In The US And You Could Owe $150k Per Book For Infringement

from the first-sale-insanity dept

Last year, we wrote about the Supreme Court's deadlocked tie over whether or not the "first sale doctrine" applies to goods made outside the US in the Omega v. Costco case (Justice Kagan recused herself due to her involvement in the case while she was Solicitor General). Because of that the ruling from the 9th Circuit effectively remains the law. The basic issue is that the US has long had a "first sale" doctrine when it comes to works covered by copyright. The basic idea is that if you buy a book, you can resell it. This is important, because without the first sale doctrine, any time you wanted to resell a product that had any parts covered by copyright, you'd have to go back and involve the copyright holder. That would, of course, strangle commerce in many areas. Imagine having to get permission (and probably pay a cut) every time you wanted to sell a book you had.

While the Omega case involved some additional sneakiness involving Omega figuring out a way to "copyright" a watch (don't ask), we noted at the time that this ruling could have horrifying consequences, such as making anyone who resells a book made outside the US liable for huge damages awards under copyright law.

And, now we have our first case testing that exact theory... and, indeed, the court has ruled that selling a book made outside of the US is copyright infringement and there's no first sale defense. In this case, the bookseller was found guilty of willful infringement, because he was selling textbooks legally bought in Asia in the US, and told to pay $75,000 per infringement (in this case, eight books: $600,000), though it could have been as high as $150,000.

Applying these principles to the facts of this case, we conclude that the District Court correctly decided that Kirtsaeng could not avail himself of the first sale doctrine codified by § 109(a) since all the books in question were manufactured outside of the United States. In sum, we hold that the phrase “lawfully made under this Title” in § 109(a) refers specifically and exclusively to works that are made in territories in which the Copyright Act is law, and not to foreign-manufactured works.

The court basically says, hey, that's the law, pointing to the specifics in the statute, as well as the Omega ruling and a previous Supreme Court ruling. And, technically, the court may be right, as the law is drafted in an awkward way (the court says "ambiguous," but it's really just awkward), such that you can (but don't have to) read it to apply only to works first made in the US. But it's hard to see how this is not an insane result that should be fixed by Congress as quickly as possible. In an age when books (and other products) travel over borders all the time, the fact that you could risk $75,000 punishment for selling what you legally bought... is out and out crazy.

Thankfully, at least one judge on the panel felt similarly. Judge Garvan Murtha dissented from the ruling, saying that first sale should apply to works made outside the US. Murtha's argument is that the judges (and other courts perhaps) are misreading the section of Copyright Law that everyone relies on here, the part that says that First Sale applies to works "lawfully made under this title." The argument that has prevailed so far is that a work made outside of the US doesn't get US copyright protection, and thus isn't "lawfully made under this title." Murtha claims that this is a misreading, and since a US copyright holder authorized the production of this work, it was legally made under US copyright law:

The statutory text does not refer to a place of manufacture: It focuses on whether a particular copy was manufactured lawfully under title 17 of the United States Code. 17 U.S.C. § 109(a). The United States law of copyrights is contained in title 17. Accordingly, the lawfulness of the manufacture of a particular copy should be judged by U.S. copyright law. A U.S. copyright owner may make her own copies or authorize another to do so. 17 U.S.C. § 106(1). Thus, regardless of place of manufacture, a copy authorized by the U.S. rightsholder is lawful under U.S. copyright law. Here, Wiley, the U.S. copyright holder, authorized its subsidiary to manufacture the copies abroad, which were purchased and then imported into the United States.

Murtha goes all the way back to the original Supreme Court ruling on the First Sale Doctrine, in pointing out that the court first allowed the First Sale Doctrine so as not to restrict trade -- which this new ruling clearly does. Furthermore, Murtha notes the ridiculous results here, in which works made outside the US now have more strict copyright controls inside the US, and that the incentive now is for publishers to make all their books elsewhere:

Economic justifications also support applicability of the first sale doctrine to foreign made copies. Granting a copyright holder unlimited power to control all commercial activities involving copies of her work would create high transaction costs and lead to uncertainty in the secondary market. An owner first would have to determine the origin of the copy -- either domestic or foreign -- before she could sell it. If it were foreign made and the first sale doctrine does not apply to such copies, she would need to receive permission from the copyright holder. Such a result would provide greater copyright protection to copies manufactured abroad than those manufactured domestically: Once a domestic copy has been sold, no matter where the sale occurred, the copyright holder’s right to control its distribution is exhausted. I do not believe Congress intended to provide an incentive for U.S. copyright holders to manufacture copies of their work abroad.

Either way this is a mess, and makes it ridiculously dangerous to sell products under the First Sale Doctrine in the US unless you're absolutely sure where the product was first made, and if it's been authorized for sale in the US. It's going to hit hard against libraries especially, who often get books whose provenance isn't entirely known. One would hope that Congress would fix the ridiculously awkward language in the Copyright Act and make it clear that First Sale applies across the board, but since when has Congress ever done anything right with copyright law?

Filed Under: books, copyright, first sale, foreign books

Yet Another Company Says It Can Help You Sell Used MP3s

from the not-so-fast... dept

We've seen a few websites pop up over the years claiming to create marketplaces to "sell" used MP3s. The RIAA and the major record labels continue to insist such things are illegal. However, yet another one, called ReDigi is apparently set to try and it insists that its system is completely legal, though specific details are lacking.

That said, just the fact that the RIAA insists used MP3 sales are illegal proves how the RIAA is being knowingly dishonest in comparing MP3 downloads to "stealing a CD." After all, it's perfectly legal to sell a used CD. However, if the RIAA is claiming that it's not legal to sell a used MP3, then it's admitting that digital files and physical products are different. Thus, it seems like a pretty weak argument to pretend that the rules of the physical world only apply when it helps the RIAA and the major record labels, but absolutely do not apply when it leads to consumer surplus.

Filed Under: copyright, first sale, mp3s
Companies: redigi

Court Rules That It's Legal To Sell Promotional CDs

from the first-sale-lives-on dept

Last year, we had noted that the 9th Circuit appeals court was set to hear three separate cases, all revolving around the first sale doctrine, which allows you to resell copyrighted works that you possess. The first ruling of the three, back in September, was bad news: overruling a good district court ruling, in Vernor v. Autodesk, saying that anyone could effectively wipe out your first sale rights by simply putting a "license" on it. The second ruling, in MDY vs. Blizzard, was more of a mixed bag. It accepted the basics of Vernor but said that just because you violate a "license," it doesn't automatically mean you violate the copyright.

Now, the ruling in the third case, UMG vs. Augusto, has come out and it looks pretty good. It upholds the first sale rights of people who get "promotional" CDs (pdf of the ruling, which is also embedded below). Basically, the court seems to agree with the lower court's ruling, which suggested that being able to overrule first sale rights with a couple of sentences stamped on a CD, which the labels clearly never intended to get back, would undermine the entire principle of the first sale doctrine (though, it did so for different reasons).

So, how did the court square this ruling with its own decision in Vernor, which essentially said something different? It basically comes down to the fact that Universal Music gave out these CDs without expecting them back or without getting the original recipient to agree to anything specific. That is, the text stamped on the CD doesn't count as a true license agreement. But all the crap included with Autodesk software does count as a license agreement (rather than a true transfer of ownership):

It is one thing to say, as the statement does, that "acceptance" of the CD constitutes an agreement to a license and its restrictions, but it is quite another to maintain that "acceptance" may be assumed when the recipient makes no response at all. This record reflects no responses. Even when the evidence is viewed in the light most favorable to UMG, it does not show that any recipients agreed to enter into a license agreement with UMG when they received the CDs.

Because the record here is devoid of any indication that the recipients agreed to a license, there is no evidence to support a conclusion that licenses were established under the terms of the promotional statement. Accordingly, we conclude that UMG's transfer of possession to the recipients, without meaningful control or even knowledge of the status of the CDs after shipment, accomplished a transfer of title.

The main difference between the lower court ruling and this new ruling is that the appeals court focused on the lack of any actual "agreement" in the license, while the lower court focused on the lack of expected return of the promotional CD.

Not surprisingly, I think the court got this right but since I also believe that the earlier Vernor ruling was very, very wrong, it's not surprising that I think this ruling does a nifty little tap dance to pretend that this ruling and the Vernor ruling are consistent. It basically says that it all depends on "the means of distribution," in that recipients of promo CDs did not ask for them, while purchasers of software did. But that seems to be besides the point and somewhat unrelated. The same issue that seems to drive this ruling for Augusto should apply to Vernor as well. The court notes that there's "no acceptance" of a license and you can't assume acceptance via no response. And yet, that's how most such software licenses work as well.

While I'm happy about this particular ruling, it still seems to conflict with itself and I would imagine we haven't heard the last of these three first sale cases...

Filed Under: augusto, copyright, first sale, license, promotional cds, vernor
Companies: universal music

Some Good, Some Bad In New Ruling On Whether Or Not WoW Bot Infringes Copyright

from the no-contributory-infringement dept

It's quite a week for First Sale issues in copyright (and it's only Tuesday!). We already had the Supreme Court's non-decision stalemate on the Costco/Omega case, and now we've got another of the trifecta of first sale cases in the 9th Circuit. As you may recall, that court is considering three rather important cases concerning first sale rights, with the first one (Vernor v. Autodesk) already decided such that you no longer actually own most of the software you thought you bought.

Today, the court came out with its ruling in the MDY vs. Blizzard case, which as we noted had a really troubling district court ruling. This case was controversial because it involved a bot maker that let people automate certain tasks in World of Warcraft. Many people sided with Blizzard in this case because they just hate bots and people who use them -- but I don't think they considered the larger copyright issues raised by the original ruling, which said the bot software itself, called Glider, infringed on Blizzard's copyright. If you want a thorough understanding of how tortured the court's logic was in that case, just read William Patry's summary at the time, where he notes that absolutely nothing Glider did appeared to violate Blizzard's exclusive rights as laid out in the Copyright Act, so the judge effectively made stuff up -- saying that because using the bot violates the terms of service, it makes the "copy" of WoW (even if it was legally purchased) "unauthorized," and thus infringing. Thus, according to the ruling, Glider was responsible for contributory copyright infringement.

Thankfully, the appeals court appears to have walked back most of that part of the ruling. While it tips its cap to the Vernor decision, and says that you don't own your copy of WoW, but merely license it, it says that just because the Glider software might violate the terms of service, it doesn't mean that copyright law is automatically violated. It points out that there are lots of ways you can violate a software license that have nothing, whatsoever, to do with copyright's exclusive rights, and thus, just violating a terms of service shouldn't mean you violate copyright law. Thus, using Glider does not directly infringe on Blizzard's copyright (in this instance), and therefore, there's no contributory infringement on MDY's part, because there's no direct infringement that it could contribute to:

Were we to hold otherwise, Blizzard -- or any software copyright holder -- could designate any disfavored conduct during software use as copyright infringement, by purporting to condition the license on the player's abstention from the disfavored conduct. The rationale would be that because the conduct occurs while the player's computer is copying the software code into RAM in order for it to run, the violation is copyright infringement. This would allow software copyright owners far greater rights than Congress has generally conferred on copyright owners.

That said, MDY still runs into trouble due to the (you guessed it) ridiculous anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA. The court finds that MDY effectively "trafficked" in circumvention tools with Glider, in getting around Blizzard's anti-bot software, called Warden. Here, the ruling gets right back to being troubling. While it discusses the Federal Circuit's ruling that said third party providers of garage door openers were not violating the DMCA by getting around anti-circumvention tools in garage opener technology, because no copyright was violated beyond the circumvention, it says it chooses to ignore that decision -- saying it doesn't believe Congress intended the DMCA to work that way. Now, it's true that this court is under no obligation to follow that ruling, it's still troubling.

There is a further discussion about exactly which parts of the DMCA are and are not violated here, which begins to get really down in the weeds, so I'll skip the discussion on that for now, but you can read the entire ruling after the jump.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, bots, copyright, dmca, first sale, glider, world of warcraft
Companies: blizzard, mdy

Supreme Court Ruling: You May Not Be Able To Legally Sell A Product First Made Outside The US

from the this-is-bad dept

Earlier this year, we covered a rather important copyright case in the Supreme Court, between watchmaker Omega and retailing giant Costco. The crux of the issue was that Costco bought a bunch of Omega watches that were not meant for sale in the US, imported them, and started selling them in the US for less than Omega was selling other watches here. Your basic principles of "you bought it, you can resell it" seemed to apply, but Omega had a nasty copyright trick up it's sleeve. It had put a little 0.5 cm "globe" design on the underside of the watches -- where no one would see it, and then claimed copyright on the design. Thus, they claimed that Costco's attempt to resell the watches was copyright infringement. Of course, US copyright law has a right of first sale (the same "you bought it, you can resell it" concept), but Omega's lawyers craftily sought out a loophole in US copyright law.

The Copyright Act's section that deals with first sale rights (section 109(a) for those playing along with the home game) notes that it only applies to copies "lawfully made under this title." Omega's lawyers argued that the design on the watches does not count because the watchers were made outside of the US, and thus not covered by US copyright law and thus the design was not lawfully made under US copyright law.

The Ninth Circuit appeals court -- which certainly has a history of wacky rulings -- agreed with Omega's interpretation of the law and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. The court deadlocked on the issue today, coming to a 4-4 tie (with Justice Kagan not taking part, since she had filed an amicus brief in the case as Solicitor General), meaning that the 9th Circuit ruling stands and copyrighted products first made outside the US may no longer have a right of first sale.

In other words, be careful if you buy a book that was first published outside the US. Technically, you may no longer have a legal right to sell it -- or even to lend it to to others, which is why librarians were reasonably worried about this decision.

If there's any sort of silver lining to all of this, the fact that the Justices deadlocked, rather than coming to a full decision means that it's not a precedential ruling and a different case could allow them to decide differently later on. Though, if you were wondering, when Kagan filed the amicus brief as Solicitor General... she sided with Omega, and said the Supreme Court should not take the case, since the 9th Circuit's ruling was just fine.

Filed Under: copyright, first sale, supreme court
Companies: costco, omega

Netflix's Move From DVDs To Streaming Shows The Massive Value Of First Sale Doctrine

from the those-exceptions-are-important dept

We've pointed out many times in the past that exceptions to copyright (such as fair use and the first sale doctrine) may actually be a lot more important than copyright itself in "promoting the progress." For example, we've highlighted CCIA's study that uses the identical methodology used by the entertainment industry to claim that copyright contributes $1.52 trillion to the economy to show that exceptions to copyright law (again, things like fair use and the first sale doctrine) contribute significantly more. However, have we ever really quantified specific exceptions? We recently covered how the movie studios were upset about Netflix, and demanding much higher fees for allowing streaming -- and that actually highlights how damaging a loss of those copyright exceptions can be.

Edwad Epstein has a post over at TheWrap.com pointing out the massive differences in costs facing Netflix between buying DVDs that it can rent by mail and licensing movies for streaming. The key issue: the first sale doctrine. If Netflix wants, it can buy DVDs from any particular source and then use them in its business. It need not get any licenses with the movie industry. Yet, for streaming, there is no first sale situation, so it needs to license. And the differences in costs to Netflix are substantial. Epstein notes that it costs Netflix about $15 to buy each DVD, but to license a single movie title the industry wants $16 million for a two year license.

Where Netflix can buy 10,000 copies of a major title for $150,000 to mail out, it will need to spend about $16 million to license it for streaming. Such a hundredfold increase in price can obviously be deleterious to profits especially since Netflix still has to maintain its mailing centers, and buy DVDs, for the subscribers who elect to continuing using the mail-in service either because they prefer DVDs’ higher quality and features or they don’t have the apparatus to receive digital streaming.

First of all, $16 million for a single title? Yikes. Someone please tell me that's only for the really big titles. But, even if the numbers are slightly off, think about the obvious impact here. When you make the product much more expensive, you're definitely going to limit its availability to the public. Netflix will either choose to stream fewer movies or it will have to increase its own prices, creating a net loss for the public. In this case, the right of first sale allows Netflix to bring the cost of doing business down by an order of magnitude, since it is not wholly locked to the studios.

Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. As we've seen with Redbox kiosk DVD rentals (and, to a lesser extent, Netflix), the movie studios have worked hard to get around first sale rights, by telling wholesalers not to supply DVDs to DVD rental companies if those companies won't cough up some sort of revenue share plan. Those actions (which certainly seem to violate antitrust laws) suggest that the studios recognize how much value there is in killing first sale rights.

But as a society, this should concern us greatly. The move to digital actually allows the studios (and other content producers) to effectively kill off such first sale rights. We've seen this in other industries as well. There have long been questions about whether or not you can sell an iTunes song you legally purchased -- and the video game industry has been so desperate to kill off the secondary market, that it's quite excited about the move to digital.

This should be a concern for everyone, however. Studies have shown that a robust secondary (used) market actually helps drive the primary market and makes it larger. If you know you can resell something you bought, it makes you more willing to buy it (minimizing your risk) while also increasing the value of the product (since it can bring in some money on the back end). Yet, in the big content business's short-sighted attempts to kill off the secondary market by going digital, they may do harm to the primary market as well.

Of course, the real issue is going to be that, one of these days, someone's going to test the first sale rights on digital goods too, and I would imagine that there will be quite a giant lawsuit around that.

Filed Under: buying, copyright, dvds, first sale, licensing, movies, streaming
Companies: netflix

Is It Patent Infringement To Reuse Recycled Apple Magsafe Connectors?

from the patent-exhaustion dept

AppleInsider has the details of yet another patent infringement lawsuit filed by Apple, who has become a lot more aggressive on the patent front lately. This lawsuit is against Sanho, a company that makes a variety of external batteries for Apple products. There are six patents listed in the lawsuit, but two are design patents, which are pretty narrow. The four (really three) utility patents are

• 7,517,222: Magnetic connector for electronic device
• 7,627,343 & 7,751,853 (really the same patent, as one is a continuation of the other: Female receptacle data pin connector
• 7,783,070: Cable adapter for a media player system

All of them, obviously, have to do with the connectors Apple uses to charge its various products, including the famed "MagSafe" charger found on Apple laptops that connect via a magnet, which break away easily (such as if someone trips over the cord). I do remember when this first came out, that Apple indicated it had patented up the technology and would block others from using it.

However, where this gets interesting is that, according to Sanho's website, it doesn't make its own magnetic connectors, but simply recycles official Apple connectors:

"Our charging cables use original Apple MagSafe connectors for maximum compatibility,"

If that's the case, it seems to raise some questions about patent exhaustion, where a company can't license a patent for one player in a supply chain, but then claim that later buyers, who are buying from the original licensee need to re-license the patent. Think of it as being similar to the principle of "first sale" in copyright. I would think that, on those connectors at the very least, Sanho could make a case for patent exhaustion if it really is just buying up official Apple MagSafe connectors and repurposing them.

Filed Under: first sale, magsafe, patent exhaustion, patents
Companies: apple, sanho

Appeals Court Destroys First Sale; You Don't Own Your Software Anymore

from the let's-see-some-licenses dept

Earlier this year, we noted that the 9th Circuit appeals court was facing three separate important cases about the "first sale doctrine." We also warned that the 9th Circuit can be wacky at times, and its first ruling of the three confirms that, by effectively wiping out the first sale doctrine and stating that buying a piece of software is not really buying a piece of software -- and that, in many cases, you've merely licensed it and cannot resell it. The key point:

We hold today that a software user is a licensee rather than an owner of a copy where the copyright owner (1) specifies that the user is granted a license; (2) significantly restricts the user's ability to transfer the software; and (3) imposes notable use restrictions.

The full ruling is here: The case involved a regular eBay seller, who bought some copies of Autodesk at an "office sale" from a company who was no longer using them. He put four of the copies up on eBay for sale, and in each case, Autodesk sent a DMCA takedown notice. The guy, Timothy Vernor, counternoticed each time and Autodesk failed to reply each time, leading the auctions to be reinstated. However, despite all of this, when the 4th takedown came, eBay automatically suspended Vernor's account, and it took about a month to get it reinstated. So, he sued Autodesk, and claimed that he had the right to sell these copies that he had legally obtained.

Last year, the district court sided with Vernor, saying that Autodesk had no right to restrict his first sale rights (which allow you to resell a legally owned copyrighted product without first getting permission from the copyright holder), and that Autodesk's "license" was really a license in name only, since at no point did the possessor of the software have to return it. Instead, the court pointed out that when you bought AutoCAD, there really was a transfer of ownership.

Tragically, the appeals court disagrees with that, and effectively opens the door to effectively killing off the entire concept of the first sale doctrine, by highlighting the rather simple steps anyone needs to take to make sure any "sale" is really considered a "license," and thus removing the first sale rights. Basically, you just have to say there's a license and that "license" has to have a few rather simple things in it. You know all those stories about video game companies hating the used game market? Well, video game companies just got their "kill the secondary market free" card from the 9th Circuit. Of course, as we've pointed out, having a secondary market tends to increase the value of the primary market, so software companies (and others selling copyrighted works) may wish to think carefully before wiping out the secondary markets.

The court does note that this ruling could have quite a negative impact, but says that it's ruling based on what the law says, and suggests that perhaps Congress may wish to revisit this issue (fat chance of that happening, of course). While it is true that a court must rule within the law, even if it thinks the end result is bad, I think that the court here is using that as an excuse. The more you look at the details, the more you realize this is a license-in-name-only, and (as the lower court realized) the court could easily make that point and stay within the law, protecting these important first sale rights.

That said, this case is hardly over. Vernor's lawyer on the case, Greg Beck from Public Citizen has already announced plans to ask the court to reconsider the case en banc (i.e., with the full panel of judges, rather than just the three judge panel who heard the case), and even if that fails, this case will certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court. Given the two other first sale cases soon to be heard, combined with what appears to be (even if the court denies it) a circuit split with at least the 2nd Circuit on first sale issues, hopefully the Supreme Court will set the record straight and reinstate first sale rights for software. It would be great, of course, for Congress to just step in and fix things, but it's difficult to remember the last time Congress got something right when it came to copyright law... and with lobbying giants like the MPAA siding with Autodesk on this one, you can bet that no one in Congress will be able to secure enough votes to fix things.

This ruling is pretty depressing if you actually believe in property rights. It shows, once again, how copyright is not a property right, but often quite the opposite: restricting what people can do with their own property.

Filed Under: buy, copyright, first sale, license, software, vernor
Companies: autodesk, ebay