Traditional copyright law maintains a balance of rights between the owner of intellectual property and the purchaser of a physical item that embodies the intellectual property. One such balancing method is the “first sale doctrine.”
This doctrine, codified in 17 U.S.C. � 109(a), permits one who has legally purchased the work to give or resell the work to another person without infringing on the copyright owner’s distribution right and without obtaining the copyright owner’s permission. Therefore, the copyright owner’s right to control distribution of a copy of the work is limited to the first sale. Purchasers of that copyrighted work may then do as they please with it without consulting the copyright owner, i.e. purchasers may then sell, loan, share, give away or even destroy the original (however, the purchaser may not make additional copies).
