Coyote Blog

Movie producers sell DVDs cheaper in, say, Taiwan than they do in the US.  This is not an unheard of economic phenomenon -- it happens in every commodity and product.  The reason we don't notice these price differences too much is that traders and arbitragers and shipping companies will target the largest price differentials and take advantage of them by buying and shifting products around until the price differential is less than the transportation and transaction costs.  Basic economics.

However, despite a number of structural advantages that already serve to reduce this cross-flow (e.g. different languages), the media companies are trying to stretch copyright law far beyond what CopyOwner says is legally defensible:

Copyright owners (including the owners of the "works" embodied in
the copyrighted labels on common non-copyrighted goods) like to
discriminate in pricing by creating artificial markets so that
discounts in one market won't be resold at a lower price in over-priced
markets. The thinking goes, "Why let U.S. consumers get the benefit of
prices that are affordable to people in developing countries when we
know we can get more out of the U.S. consumer's pocket?"

The
"first sale doctrine," now codified as Section 109 of the Copyright
Act, makes clear that the copyright owner's right of distribution is
subject to the copy owner's right to sell it to anyone, anywhere, at
any price. And that's great policy. Entrepreneurs who see too big a gap
between the prices charged U.S. consumers and the prices charged
consumers elsewhere for identical copies can buy the cheaper product
and sell it at a profit, while still giving the U.S. consumer a better
bargain.

But that's not why I nearly fell out of my chair. I
was used to these anti-competitive price discriminators ranting about
perfectly lawful gray market goods. What this story does is label these
perfectly legal importers as pirates. That's right. Despite quoting the
Supreme Court in Quality King Distributors v. L'anza Research International,
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," a ruling that suggests that the
evildoers are those who try to circumvent the law by preventing gray
market imports, they go on to call the importers "pirates"