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The first-sale doctrine indeed allows people to retail stuff they just bought. But in the case of Amazon, I’d almost say that the first-sale doctrine, followed to its natural conclusion, should better be called the “Man in the Middle doctrine”—that it would be perfectly fine and legal to 1. buy an iPhone from Apple, 2. install a wiretap into it, 3. repackage it as if it were a Brand New In Box iPhone, 4. and send it to Amazon to dump into their regular BNIB iPhone SKU bin. That seems nonsensical, right? Maybe trademark won’t work, but something should be preventing that. Maybe Amazon would have to do it themselves—marking certain SKU as “allocated” to particular sellers, and voiding the SKU claim of any other seller who sends them said product, instead slapping a replacement UPC code on that product giving it a namespaced SKU particular to that seller. To me, this would be like one of the key guidelines of journalism: if you can’t verify a claim from a source, you shouldn’t use that claim, but only mention that claim. I.e., Apple sells iPhones, but everyone else can only sell “iPhones.” They claim that they’re iPhones, but Amazon certainly doesn’t have a way to verify that they’re the exact iPhones Apple sells, so they can’t remove those quotation marks (or bin them in the same bin as Apple iPhones.) I would note that this is already partially done, in that Amazon warehouses do bin products with a given UPC code as a different SKU if they come in marked as “used.” All I’m suggesting here is a business rule that would change the definition of “used” used by the inventory system to include any secondary-market resale of the product—regardless of the condition of the product—if the product is anything that could be either cloned profitably or tampered with to some useful end. |