USA's Finest Supreme Court Ruling for Reuse

One of the places where the USA truly is a guardian of freedom and a defender of opportunity is the US Supreme Court and defenders of patent exhaustion policy.  The USA's defense of Jazz Camera in the seminal "first use" law case says....  If you buy it you own it.  If someone doesn't want you to own it, they have to offer you a LEASE, and there is a contract.   When the manufacturer has no lease agreement, and tries to claim that because of their patent or trademark, that you don't really own it and cannot resell it, the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously in the buyer's favor.

Congress I'm not so sure of.

Electronic Fronterier Foundation needs an international office...

Stay in the company, Willie

China's courts, like Japanese courts, are extending patents to OEMs in a payola scheme which takes advantage of most people's ignorance of the issue.  Japanese law was bought by OEMs decades ago, and established many of the "cash for clunker" and anti-refurbishment, anti-reuse policies which are spreading to Korea and other countries.

"Judiciating Obsolescence" worries me more than anything else... but seems like tin-foil hat paranoia to most of my friends and co-workers.  But that is exactly what is happening in other countries, and we have had some close calls here in the USA.

Jazz Photo Corp. v. United States International Trade Commission, 264 F. 3d 1094 (Fed. Cir. 2001), was a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit clarified the law of repair and reconstruction (permitting the owner of a patented item to fix the item when it breaks, but not to essentially build a new item from the parts of an old one), holding that it was not a patent infringement for one party to restore another party's patented "one-use" camera to be used a second time.

How China Kicked Our Asses in Africa

Photo and post inspired from London School of Economics Africa Blog, 
Africa and China: How it all began

Syerramia Willoughby  Jan 2012

What I'm doing with Fair Trade Recycling is perfect.  It's appropriate technology, it gives Africans affordable internet, and the repair jobs which pay too little to do in the USA create 10 times the per hour wages for Africa.  It's the "tinkerer blessing", the opposite of the Resource Curse.

Thanks for the Business, Uncle Sam

It seeds and creates and pays for an appropriate technology recycling system.  While only 15% of imports of used equipment are bad (Wal-Mart returns are 11%), paying for the proper disassembly and recycling of incidental breakage, elective upgraded parts, etc. creates a recycling infrastructure.

In Retroworks de Mexico, that creates a "computers for clunkers" trade in program where the ones they refurbish for resale can be exchanged for the domestic-generated e-waste.  That's the system already in Africa, people trade in the ten year old ones for more recently imported and upgraded, which is the link between the importers and Agbogbloshie.  BAN and Greenpeace and Interpol would have known this if they'd given Souleymane, Wahab, Hamdy, Somda or Miguel the courtesy of a discussion rather than just profile them as "waste tourists".

USA would be smart to be selling the repair and working display devices etc. to Africa.  We create more income and more jobs through reuse.  We cannot afford to have an idiotic 48 cent per pound California-destroy-all SB20 system.

USA has former Peace Corps volunteers like me, African immigrants like Wahab and Souleymane, and a history as a melting pot which our biggest competitors - China, Japan and South Korea - didn't have.