Season 5, Episode 11. The Secret Laws of Reselling: IP Rights in Secondary Markets

Ever wondered what happens when your right to resell clashes with someone else’s trademark? The secondary market is booming—from luxury perfumes to used hard drives and even virtual farm animals—but these second lives come with surprising legal complications.

Secondary markets aren’t just about thrift store finds anymore. They’re complex ecosystems where intellectual property law determines what you can truly do with the things you’ve purchased. Through a global tour of fascinating court cases, we unpack the legal principles that govern reselling, refurbishing, and reimagining products across physical and digital realms.

In Norway, a phone repair shop learned the hard way that erasing Apple logos from replacement screens doesn’t erase their legal obligations. Meanwhile, in India, courts embraced refurbished Seagate hard drives as sustainability wins. The digital world presents even thornier questions—can you resell an e-book like a paperback? (Spoiler: European courts say no.) And what about those $133,000 “MetaBirkin” NFTs that landed an artist in hot water with Hermès?

From Brazilian video game importers to Italian pharmaceutical repackagers, we explore how trademark exhaustion works differently across borders. You’ll discover why Chanel fights so hard to control where its perfumes are sold, how Zynga protected its virtual cows from unauthorized trading, and what happens when Finnish axes travel from North America to the Czech Republic without permission.

Whether you’re flipping consoles, fixing phones, or minting NFTs of luxury handbags, understanding these landmark cases could save you from accidental infringement. Secondary markets provide real benefits—reducing waste and extending product lifecycles—but navigating them legally requires knowing when ownership ends and intellectual property begins.

Subscribe to Intangiblia for more plain talk about complex IP issues that affect everyday transactions in our increasingly digital marketplace. Your secondhand purchases might come with more legal baggage than you realized!

Jean Marc Seigneur – In Trust We Build: Designing the Future of Digital Reputation Intangiblia™

What if your glasses could spot a deepfake before your gut does? We sit down with Jean Marc Seigneur, a veteran researcher of decentralized trust, to map where security failed, where it’s catching up, and how proof—not vibes—will anchor the next decade of digital life. From central bank digital currencies to NFTs that carry qualified electronic signatures, we unpack how legal recognition and cryptography can finally meet in the middle, turning tokens into enforceable rights and payments into reliable public infrastructure.We also go beyond buzzwords to the missing pieces: education and design. Friendly apps hide sharp edges, so we talk about why countries need their own experts, not just imported tech, and how wallets must evolve with safer recovery, better defaults, and interfaces that explain risk without slowing you down. AI raises the stakes, so we explore signed videos, verifiable identities, and provenance trails that help you tell a real voice from a cloned one at a glance. Reputation won’t live on a web page for long; it’s moving into the physical world as augmented overlays that can help or harm depending on what they reveal and to whom.Bias won’t vanish either, because human trust is social and local. We discuss how to balance peer signals with regulators’ oversight, why transparency about AI use will give way to tracking human effort, and what a time-based “work token” could add to creative markets. The red thread across it all—payments, NFTs, augmented humans, and AI media—is simple and demanding: protect freedom while proving claims. If we want technology that empowers rather than deceives, we have to design, debate, and defend the trust layer itself.Enjoy the conversation? Subscribe, share with a friend who cares about digital trust, and leave a review to help more curious minds find the show.Send us a textCheck out "Protection for the Inventive Mind" – available now on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. The views and opinions expressed (by the host and guest(s)) in this podcast are strictly their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the entities with which they may be affiliated. This podcast should in no way be construed as promoting or criticizing any particular government policy, institutional position, private interest or commercial entity. Any content provided is for informational and educational purposes only.
  1. Jean Marc Seigneur – In Trust We Build: Designing the Future of Digital Reputation
  2. Vlada Mentink – Lean, Smart, and Automated: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Working with AI
  3. Heidrun Wechter-Essig – The Board Whisperer: Power, Pivots, and Playing the Long Game
  4. Anna Aseeva – Sustainable by Code: Rethinking Tech Governance from IP to AI
  5. Vipin Saroha – Beyond the Dashboard: How Data and AI Are Rewiring Public Value

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