Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I think it was a very bad idea ever to ban "grey imports". I regret that it's still the case in the EU.
And if this ruling had gone the other way, far more than grey imports would have been banned.
Any item containing any copyright material that was manufactured outside the US would have become illegal to resell in the US. Even if bought there. A publisher would have been able to print books in China for sale in the US market, and then forbidden the resale of those books.
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What this decision means, though, is that manufacturers have effectively lost the right to be able to set prices according to local market conditions, and that's a very, very bad thing, which is going to end up being extremely bad for the consumer in the long term. This won't only affect consumers in the US - it will affect people all over the world.