Saturday, October 6, 2012

Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril

“It means that it’s harder for consumers to buy used products and harder for them to sell them,” said Jonathan Bland, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association for Research Libraries. “This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.” 

Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale. 

It could be your personal electronic devices or the family jewels that have been passed down from your great-grandparents who immigrated from Spain. It could be a book that was written by an American writer but printed and bound overseas or an Italian painter’s artwork. 

It has implications for a variety of wide-ranging U.S. entities including libraries, musicians, museums and even resale juggernauts eBay and Craigslist. U.S. libraries, for example, carry some 200 million books from foreign publishers.
“It would be absurd to say anything manufactured abroad can’t be bought or sold here,” said Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment lawyer and Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation who specializes in technology issues.




Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril - Jennifer Waters's Consumer Confidential - MarketWatch

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