OCTOBER TERM, 1997
Syllabus
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the ninth circuit
No. 96-1470. Argued December 8, 1997—Decided March 9, 1998
Respondent L'anza, a California manufacturer, sells its hair care products in this country exclusively to distributors who have agreed to resell within limited geographic areas and only to authorized retailers. L'anza promotes its domestic sales with extensive advertising and special retailer training. In foreign markets, however, it does not engage in comparable advertising or promotion; its foreign prices are substantially lower than its domestic prices. It appears that after L'anza's United Kingdom distributor arranged for the sale of several tons of L'anza products, affixed with copyrighted labels, to a distributor in Malta, that distributor sold the goods to petitioner, which imported them back into this country without L'anza's permission and then resold them at discounted prices to unauthorized retailers. L'anza filed suit, alleging that petitioner's actions violated L'anza's exclusive rights under the Copyright Act of 1976 (Act), 17 U. S. C. §§ 106, 501, and 602, to reproduce and distribute the copyrighted material in the United States. The District Court rejected petitioner's "first sale" defense under § 109(a) and entered summary judgment for L'anza. Concluding that § 602(a), which gives copyright owners the right to prohibit the unauthorized importation of copies, would be "meaningless" if § 109(a) provided a defense, the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
Held: The first sale doctrine endorsed in § 109(a) is applicable to imported copies. Pp. 140-154.
(a) In Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U. S. 339, 349-350, this Court held that the exclusive right to "vend" under the copyright statute then in force applied only to the first sale of a copyrighted work. Congress subsequently codified Bobbs-Merrill's first sale doctrine in the Act. Section 106(3) gives the copyright holder the exclusive right "to distribute copies . . . by sale or other transfer of ownership," but § 109(a) provides: "Notwithstanding . . . [§ ]106(3), the owner of a particular copy . . . lawfully made under this title . . . is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy . . . ." Although the first sale doctrine prevents L'anza from treating unauthorized resales by its domestic distributors as an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute, L'anza claims that § 602(a), properly construed, prohibits its foreign distributors from reselling
135
Page: Index 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007