Now that the UK has left the European Union, the UK government must decide on its own rules for copyright exhaustion on physical books and other intellectual property. On Monday, the government opened a consultation on whether to institute parallel trade—common in pharmaceuticals and other consumer goods—which would allow for the resale of printed books across borders without publisher permission. Until the end of 2020, once a book was placed on the market in the UK and European Economic Area, the copyright was “exhausted” and authors and publishers had no control over the resale of their book in those countries. […]
