George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

Summary of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons by Professor Chris Newman

Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, U.S. Supreme Court, decided March 19, 2013

Chris Newman
Assistant Professor of Law
George Mason University School of Law

This is best described as a decision in which the Court felt compelled to choose between two readings of the Copyright Act, either of which led to unpalatable results.   One reading would eviscerate the exclusive importation right that Congress had sought to grant copyright owners.  The other would insert a huge loophole into the first-sale doctrine, which denies a copyright owner the right to control how people dispose of copies of protected works once they lawfully acquire ownership of them.   The argument was largely couched in the language of statutory interpretation, but at the end of the day the question was which horrible did more of the Justices fear more.  

The majority, in an opinion by Justice Breyer, chose to sacrifice the importation right.  This means that U.S. copyright owners may not rely on copyright law to aid them in segmenting the world market into domestic and foreign exclusive distribution zones.   Which is nice—at least in the short run—for U.S. consumers who want to buy cheap gray market imports.  It may turn out to be less nice in the long run for petitioner Kirtsaeng’s fellow citizens in Thailand, to whom U.S. textbook publishers may no longer be willing to sell books at prices that support arbitrage.  As Justice Kagan frankly acknowledged in concurrence, this is a suboptimal result that might have been avoided had the court taken a different route in an earlier case.  

The three dissenters would have opted to preserve the importation right, and in terms of straightforward textual interpretation, this commenter thinks Justice Ginsburg got the better of the argument.   What cost her the day was her inability to read the statute in a way that definitively closed the potential loophole in first sale doctrine, so as to dispel the spectre of permitting copyright owners to move all their manufacturing overseas and thereby gain the right to control all downstream distribution and display of copies even after they had been legally sold.   To be sure, this would indeed be an undesirable result, and Justice Ginsburg certainly did not believe it to be a correct or desirable application of copyright law.  But the only way she could avoid it while preserving the importation right was to argue that first sale doctrine is not really governed by the language in which it was codified in the statute.  Her solution makes sense as a matter of policy, but there was no way for the Court to adopt and make it stick in the context of this case, which would have left the spectre seemingly at large and triumphant.