Doctrine of Exhaustion in Relation to Copyright Law in India and Parallel Imports

Abstract

In intellectual property law, “exhaustion” refers to the extinction of the entitlement to prevent the further sale of a product once the product has been put on the market. Developing such a limitation becomes necessary in order to reconcile the exclusivity granted under intellectual property laws and the requirement of modern commerce and trade. Copyright law aims to protect the expression of an idea in the form of a literary, artistic, dramatic, musical work etc. only when it has been fixed in any tangible medium i.e. literary work may in the form of hard copies as books or soft copies in electronic form, or in case of cinematography films in the form of CDs/DVDs. Incontrovertibly the copyright of the owner would continue to subsist in the work even after the sale of a copy of his work and endure for a term of sixty years beyond after his death, but whether or not the owner could have a hold over the subsequent sales also is an issue dealt with differently by different legal regimes.