Professor Marketa Trimble's recent guest blog post at Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog concerns a copyright case that the U.S. Supreme Court has scheduled for oral arguments on October 29, 2012.
Professor Trimble explains that "although the focus of the controversy [in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons] has been on distinguishing between foreign-made and U.S.-made copies, the key policy question in the decision should rather be which principle of copyright exhaustion the United States should adopt for all copies: the principle of international exhaustion or the principle of national exhaustion. ... The question is, whether the Supreme Court could both 1) abandon the distinction between copies based on their place of manufacture, and 2) make a conscious policy choice between the principles of national and international exhaustion. It might seem that the constraints of the language of the Copyright Act would preclude an interpretation that would lead to taking the two steps simultaneously."
The post is available here.
