The U.S. Supreme Court has announced its decision in favor of booksellers being allowed to resell secondhand books.

A heated court battle between booksellers, libraries, museums and other retailers on one side and book publishers on the other has been going on for some time now. However, in an April issue article published by Americana Exchange, the court has ruled in favor of booksellers being allowed to resell secondhand books.

According to the court's decision, publishers may not use copyright law to prevent the owners of used books published abroad from reselling, loaning, or giving away. Many people are not aware that reselling a secondhand book was even an issue, but had the lower court rulings been upheld, these people may have found themselves on the losing end of a lawsuit for such behavior. Owing to this, organizations such as Powell's Books and the American Library Association united together to fight this case all the way to the Supreme Court. The final decision in favor of booksellers too is an unusual coalition of Supreme Court justices, three liberals and three conservatives, to win this decision 6-3 for the booksellers and their allies.

The court ruled that booksellers can resell used books, even though they are copyrighted by the publisher, because of something called the "first sale" doctrine. According to this doctrine, after the first sale has been made legally under the copyright law, the new owners are free to sell those goods indefinitely, regardless of copyright claims. This means a person cannot copy a copyrighted item and sell it as it is not legal under copyright law. However, if a copyright holder sells a book, the new owner can do whatever he pleases; even resell his legally purchased copy. In this case, the publisher cannot place a notice in the book saying the purchaser may not resell his copy.