The New York Times has an interesting story on the booming international trade in college textbooks. Assisted by Internet access to foreign bookstores, students have been finding that an $80 book here in the U.S. can often be had for half that price in Canada or the U.K. Entire businesses are springing up to import textbooks and resell them far below the U.S. price.
Textbook publishers hate the practice, but thanks to a 1998 Supreme Court decision,Quality King Distributors, Inc. v. L'Anza Research International, Inc., they're largely out of luck: the Court found that once (U.S.) copyrighted materials had been sold abroad, the publisher had no further ability to prohibit their resale, even into the U.S. Mmmm, first sale.
What makes Quality King an interesting case is that the "copyright" involved was about as minimal as the copyrighted code in the Chamberlain Group's garage door openers: L'Anza had claimed copyright in the labels on its shampoo bottles. The point was to gain further control over the shampoo, even after its sale abroad -- basically trying to use copyright to do some work normally assigned to trademark. I wonder whether the textbook publishers will look for a way of doing the reverse: using trademark to cover cases copyright doesn't want to touch.