First+Sale+Doctrine

toc The First Sale Doctrine is Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act. This statutory limitation is on the [|copyright] owner’s exclusive right to publicly distribute a copy of the work when another person lawfully acquired the copyright material.

This basically states that the doctrine of first sale allows the purchaser to transfer the copy to another person legally without having to obtain permission from the owner. The owner’s distribution rights end once the sale of their copy has been made. Although the first sale doctrine does apply to for example on copies of books, it strictly does not apply to the sale, lease or rental of a licensed computer program. Permission must be obtained from the copyright owner of a licensed computer program; otherwise a case such as this can be considered as constituting an infringement of acts of reproduction and public display of the computer software. The "US copyright case law supports that consumers cannot make copies of computer programs contrary to a license, but may resell what they own" (Wikipedia).

=First Sale Doctrine Cases=

The Betamax Case
In [|1979] //[|Universal Bity Studios], Inc. et al. v. [|Sony] Corporation of America Inc. et al.// (often called " [|The Betamax Case]"), resulted in a ruling that because the VCR was capable of substantial noninfringing uses, copyright owners had no legal basis to object to sales of VCRs. The legality of the VCR, coupled with the high selling price of VHS and Netamax videotaped movies ($50 each) when they were first introduced, resulted in an explosion of the home video rental industry. This business model consisted of retailers who bought the expensive tapes from movie studio distributors and rented them to consumers at a fraction of the cost, thereby making them affordable to the mass market. To the surprise of movie studio executives, video rentals stimulated huge sales volume to video retailers and, within a short time, the home video industry that motion picture studios had tried to snuff out was generating over half of the domestic revenues from all other sources combined. Coupled with the first sale doctrine, the Betamax ruling meant that Beta and VHS tapes could be purchased by video rental stores, and then rented out to the public, without permission from the copyright holders. Case obtained from: Wikipedia

=Works Cited=

Wikipedia (2006). Wikipedia The First Encylopedia. //First Sale Doctrine//. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine.