The U.S. Supreme Court’s Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons ruling that a legally obtained copyrighted work can be imported into the U.S. and resold without permission from the copyright owner, even if it was manufactured and sold overseas, will have broad legal ramifications going forward, intellectual property attorneys say.
Industries that rely on copyright protection, such as book publishers, film and television companies, and software publishers, will begin operating differently. Lawyers will start testing alternative legal strategies that could give their clients the protections they thought they had under copyright law. Congress may try to pass new legislation to grant those protections. Meanwhile, other forms of intellectual property protection could be affected by the Court’s ruling, as could U.S. international trade negotiations.
