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18 

KIRTSAENG v. JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. 

GINSBURG, J., dissenting 

copyright  owner),  and  unauthorized  importation  of 
copies or phonorecords that were lawfully made.  The 
general  approach  of  section  602  is  to  make  unauthor-
ized importation an act of infringement in both cases, 
but  to  permit  the  Bureau  of  Customs  to  prohibit  im­
portation  only  of  ‘piratical’  articles.”    S. Rep.  No.  94– 
473,  p.  151  (1975)  (emphasis  added).    See  also  H. R. 
Rep. No. 94–1476, p. 169 (1976) (same). 

In  sum,  the  legislative  history  of  the  Copyright  Act  of
1976  is  hardly  “inconclusive.”    Ante,  at  28.  To  the  con-
trary,  it  confirms  what  the  plain  text  of  the  Act  conveys:
Congress  intended  §602(a)(1)  to  provide  copyright  owners
with  a  remedy  against  the  unauthorized  importation  of 
foreign-made  copies  of  their  works,  even  if  those  copies
were  made  and  sold  abroad  with  the  copyright  owner’s
authorization.13 

IV 
Unlike the Court’s holding, my position is consistent with
the  stance  the  United  States  has  taken  in  international­
trade  negotiations.    This  case  bears  on  the  highly  con­
tentious  trade  issue  of  interterritorial  exhaustion.    The 
issue arises because intellectual property law is territorial 
in  nature,  see  supra,  at  6,  which  means  that  creators  of 
intellectual  property  “may  hold  a  set  of  parallel”  intellec­
tual  property  rights  under  the  laws  of  different  nations.
Chiappetta, The Desirability of Agreeing to Disagree: The 
WTO,  TRIPS,  International  IPR  Exhaustion  and  a  Few 
Other  Things,  21  Mich.  J.  Int’l  L.  333,  340–341  (2000)
(hereinafter  Chiappetta).  There  is  no  international  con­

—————— 

13 The Court purports to find support for its position in the House and 
Senate Committee Reports on the 1976 Copyright Act.  Ante, at 30–31. 
It  fails  to  come  up  with  anything  in  the  Act’s  legislative  history,  how­
ever, showing that Congress understood the words “lawfully made under
this title” in §109(a) to encompass foreign-made copies.