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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 04:46 PM EDT |
Caveat: IANAL. I'm simply identifying what makes sense to me to show why my
answer is: I'm not informed sufficiently to be able to make a wise decision on
this particular subject.
Here's another perspective:
You own a
multi-national covering both the US and Europe. You get a copyright on a book
in both Jurisdictions. You go to the effort of working the production lines
such that you keep the costs as low as possible in both Jurisdictions with a
mere 10% markup profit on each copy of the book. The best price you can sell
for in the US is $7.99. The best price you can sell for in Europe is
$3.99.
You are entitled to "First Sale" in the US. This means you
are entitled to the proceeds from any copy sold for the first time in the
US.
Not the exact wording of Copyright Law, but it gets the concept across
as far as the application of "First Sale" is concerned I think.
A used book
store is unhappy with how slowly they're stocking your books, they just can't
get sufficient used copies of your book fast enough.
To cover the
demand of their regulars they have a choice: they can purchase original copies
for $7.99 in the US, then sell them as "used". A loosing proposition as the
only way to generate a profit is to mark up the sell price and no one will
"purchase a used copy for a higher price then the full normal
price".
They work out they can purchase your books from Europe for
$3.99 and after all the overhead of shipping and such, sell them at
$6.99 per copy for a healthy 25% margin of profit.
Hmm... interesting
choice for the problem... but how does that affect the market.
You work out
that if you drop the price of your books to $6.99 a copy, you will be
loosing money on each sale. Since the cost for you to produce the book in the
US was $7.26, you'll loose $0.27 per copy.
Perhaps your better
business decision would have been to get the book produced in Europe and then
shipped and sold in the US. The used bookstore is purchasing the books in
Europe and getting them shipped in for a cost of $5.59.
The magic
question:
Should another business be able to effectively put you out of
local business by competing directly against you with your own product just
because they found a way to undercut your costs by purchasing your book in other
location and getting it shipped in so they can sell it at a "used"
price?
Of course... instead of going out of business, you could shut down
almost all your local offices and printing presses. Have the books manufactured
solely in Europe and then shipped over so you can charge a price of $6.15
per new copy still earning your 10%.
But then... what happens to your
business later if market forces change and the European books end up going up in
price.... or the costs of shipping increase...
Like I said: I can see
both sides of this dispute. And I can see enough factors to raise some serious
questions to be considered. But I can't see enough factors to be able to say
what "right" should be. This is all - of course - based on the "right of an
author to the proprietary production of his work for the life of
Copyright".
Whether or not Copyright should even exist in a digital world
is another question completely different in philosophy.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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