Fawcett Publications, Inc. v. Elliot Publishing Co., 46 F. Supp. 717 (1942) p.552

SUBJECT

First sale rights

FACTS

Defendant purchased plaintiff's comic books and rebound them into different volumes. Each volume contained the entire issue of plaintiff's publication.

ISSUE

Whether, by binding and reselling complete issue of defendant's publication, without its consent or approval, violated the plaintiff's admitted exclusive right to publish and secondly to vend.

RULE

Copyright act grants to the copyright owner the exclusive right "to print, reprint, copy, and vend the copyrighted work."

HOLDING

This is not an infringement.

RATIONAL

The defendant has not multiplied copies but merely resold the plaintiff's under a different cover. The exclusive right to vend is limited. It is confined to the first sale of any one copy and exters no restriction on the future sale of that copy. There must be substantial alteration to be an infringement. Here there was no such substantial alteration.

NOTES

This is different from the National Geographic case because in that case there was distribution of pieces of the whole; the issue there was whether that was a derivative work because it was a transformation.

Created on: Thursday, October 14, 1999 at 19:22:33 (PDT)