Does license over rule "first sale rights"?
- March 23, 2011 @ 1:41pmmccoymj says:We purchased a student set of nursing DVDs. (17 modules on 5 DVDs) I checked the publisher’s website and the student version was $61.00 and the instructor version was $5,800. Needless to say I purchased the student version. The students can use them in-house. They arrived and there was no license anywhere on the DVD package and I could find nothing on the publisher website. Okay, our students can check them out and watch them on our computers. In the mean time, the publisher’s sales rep contacted the nursing department. They want to sell them the instructor set which they now call the institutional or streaming rights set. They are the same DVDs. I contacted the sales person and asked about the license. She referred me up the food chain and someone sent me a copy of a generic looking license. No-we cannot let the instructors show the videos in a classroom setting and we can’t even let students check out the DVDs to view individually. The student DVDs can only be viewed by the person who purchased the set. I understand not showing the DVDs in the classroom, I think ( they are only short 15-20 minute clips) but can they say we cannot check out the DVDs to individual students. I thought that was what our “first sale” rights protected. I would gladly purchase the institutional rights for the DVDs but $5,800 is a little out of our price range for a community college. I guess the publisher is not interested in the community college market. I was just wondering if others have run into this problem and if indeed the publisher can keep the library for circulating the DVDs.
- March 23, 2011 @ 3:25pmJanetCroft says:If they really arrived without a license, I think you can get away with treating them as a first sale item -- but it would be very hard to proove a negative, that you did not get a license of any sort with them. But yes, if there IS a license, it can trump copyright law and make you sign away what would be your first sale rights.
- March 24, 2011 @ 9:59ammccoymj says:To in affect, sign away your "first sale rights" wouldn't you need to see the license up front so that when you purchased the item you agreed to the stipulations of the license by purchasing?
Posting to the forum is only available to users who are logged in.