First Sale Under Siege: If You Bought It, You Should Own It
@zoowar's retrospective from 2012 captures the critical transition from initial concept to the first dollar of customer revenue.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early traction rarely comes from passive launches; it requires direct manual outreach, personal network activation, and high-touch customer support.
Narrowing down the target audience to a specific niche allows solo founders to out-position generic horizontal competitors.
Underpricing out of fear of rejection is common; founders who set premium pricing often discover higher customer satisfaction and lower churn.
Community Debate Themes:
Discussions analyzed Show HN launch mechanics, cold DM outreach conversion rates, and the psychology of validating customer demand before writing code.
CATEGORY Zero to One →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 134 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 70 comments
EFF is leaving very important details out about at least Kirtsaeng. What's happening in that case is not simply that publishers are trying to claw back rights from US consumers. Supap Kirtsaeng took advantage of discounted pricing that Wiley offered students in poorer countries to arbitrage prices. This trick is called "parallel importation" (or "grey market importation") and it's a legal grey area, especially where copyright is concerned, turning on whether owners exhaust the right to import on first sale.
In short, the defendant in Kirtsaeng is taking advantage of a discount program Wiley never intended to offer that defendant in the first place in order to subvert Wiley's whole pricing scheme. Whether Wiley can use a legal argument about first sale to stop this or not, it seems apparent that Wiley will one way or another prevent that from happening.
Knowing HN, these details probably don't do much to change your view of the case. But you should still want to know them! This is something the EFF used to be good at, but now is quite bad at, and despite the fact that EFF mostly supports causes I agree with, I urge you to direct your donations to ACLU or other civil liberties charities instead.
Bravo, EFF.
The Kirtsaeng case is quite important because, if lost, it would create a loophole to destroy "first sale" in the U.S. entirely. Just cease manufacturing any sort of copyright material in the U.S.; move ALL production to Mexico or China. If the Kirtsaeng case is lost, reselling any of those works would become illegal, eliminating used book stores and similar enterprises entirely. And indeed, this could apply to any product with writing on it or code in it - massive incentives to move all production of such things out of the U.S., since then you would be able to prevent ANY secondary sales of your product.
VERY important case, with massive implications for the future structure of U.S. society and the economy.
I'm fine with first sale not applying to digital goods, but then you cannot call it buying but must call it renting instead. But of course, if amazon was honest and replaced the 'buy' button on a kindle book with a 'rent' button, people would be outraged at the price.
If i cannot leave something to my son in my will, it was never mine to begin with. You can't inherit kindle books, so it's obvious that you don't buy them either. There's no such thing as "buying a license", legally speaking that's called "renting".
The copyright owners have a bigger problem than what they may consider unauthorized copying. Drawing attention to compositions in sound and vision has become so much more difficult because it has become so much easier to distribute them. The scarcity has gone and so has the price. Quite a bit of the value has now decisively shifted to compositions in touch, smell, and taste, which cannot be distributed digitally.
The argument is actually about what you own. Is it the media or a license for one person to play it?
Most people I know are fed up with such word games and just plain old steal the bits and bytes (well duplicate them - whether or not that is stealing is another question). The media industries are just hanging themselves even more by the day. I don't see any tears being shed.