Cambridge Intellectual Property and Information Law: Series Number 43: Copyright Exhaustion: Law and Policy in the United States and the European Union

In this timely book, copyright scholar Peter Mezei offers a comprehensive examination of copyright exhaustion, including its historical development, theoretical framework, practical application, and policy considerations. He compares the substantive norms and case law for the first-sale doctrine in the United States and in the European Union, covering both analogue and digital applications in detail, and in doing so questions the common rejection of exhaustion in the resale of digital subject matter such as computer programs, sound recordings, audiovisual works, and e-books. Instead, he proposes a digital first-sale doctrine that would offer legal consistency to copyright law and a technologically feasible framework for content producers and consumers. This book should be read by anyone interested in how copyright law continues to evolve in conjunction with the digital world.

Introduction; 1. The theory of exhaustion; 2. The doctrine of exhaustion in the copyright law of the European Union; 3. The first sale doctrine in the copyright law of the United States; 4. Digital exhaustion in the European Union and the United States; Conclusion.