Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons: The Supreme Court Saves the First Sale Doctrine

Brian Willen, May 28, 2013

For hundreds of years, the “first sale” doctrine has been central to copyright law. It helps reconcile a fundamental tension between copyright owners’ ability to exploit their creative expressions and property owners’ right to control their own property. While copyright, as Lord Mansfield explained, is “a property in notion, and has no corporeal, tangible substance,” copyrights receive protection only when embodied in physical object