152
Opinion of the Court
portation" is neither a sale nor a disposal of a copy under § 109(a)—is unpersuasive. Strictly speaking, an importer could, of course, carry merchandise from one country to another without surrendering custody of it. In a typical commercial transaction, however, the shipper transfers "pos-session, custody, control and title to the products" 26 to a different person, and L'anza assumes that petitioner's importation of the L'anza shipments included such a transfer. An ordinary interpretation of the statement that a person is entitled "to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession" of an item surely includes the right to ship it to another person in another country.
More important, the Solicitor General's cramped reading of the text of the statutes is at odds not only with § 602(a)'s more flexible treatment of unauthorized importation as an infringement of the distribution right (even when there is no literal "distribution"), but also with the necessarily broad reach of § 109(a). The whole point of the first sale doctrine is that once the copyright owner places a copyrighted item in the stream of commerce by selling it, he has exhausted his exclusive statutory right to control its distribution. As we have recognized, the codification of that doctrine in § 109(a) makes it clear that the doctrine applies only to copies that are "lawfully made under this title," but that was also true of the copies involved in the Bobbs-Merrill case, as well as those involved in the earlier cases applying the doctrine. There is no reason to assume that Congress intended either § 109(a) or the earlier codifications of the doctrine to limit its broad scope.27
In sum, we are not persuaded by either L'anza's or the Solicitor General's textual arguments.
26 App. 87.
27 See, e. g., H. R. Rep. No. 1476, 94th Cong., 2d Sess., 79 (1979) ("Section 109(a) restates and confirms" the first sale doctrine established by prior case law); S. Rep. No. 473, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., 71 (1975) (same).
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