Melville House Books

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled in favor of four American text book publishers that “two foreign online booksellers are guilty of copyright infringement for illegally importing into the U.S. textbook editions that were produced only for distribution in overseas markets.” According to a Publishers Weekly report by Calvin Reid, the foreign publishers, Jun Liao and Zhengshu Go, claimed “that sales of the textbooks in the U.S. were protected by the ‘first sale’ doctrine, which holds that the purchaser of a legal copy of a book can sell it or give it away without the copyright holder’s permission.” But Judge Sidney H. Stein decreed “The resale in the United States of copies manufactured outside the United States is not protected under the terms of the statute.” He awarded the four US publishers — McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson Education, John Wiley & Sons and Cengage Learning — $125,000 in damages.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.