Section 602 of the United States Copyright Act provides that importation without the authority of the copyright owner of copies or phonorecords of a work of a copyright work is an infringement of the exclusive distribution right given to a copyright owner as part of the bundle of rights that make up copyright. Section 109 gives the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord that has been lawfully made under the statute the right to sell or otherwise dispose of that copy or phonorecord notwithstanding the copyright owner's exclusive distribution right. The question before the Supreme Court in Quality King Distributors v. L'anza Research International was whether these provisions enabled a copyright owner to prevent importation into the United States of copies of a work that it had itself made in the United States but which it had exported from the United States and which were now being reimported into the United States without its permission.

The case was somewhat unusual in that the work in question was the label on a bottle of a hair care product. L'anza only sold the product in the United States to authorized retailers but was less concerned about the channels of trade into which it sold the products overseas where it sold the product at a lower price. In the present case the hair care product finished up in Malta whence it was sold back into the United States to distributors who resold the goods to unauthorized retailers at a discount.

The Supreme Court's approach in finding that there was no infringement was to look at the wording of the two sections of the statute, find that the copies in question complied with Section 109 in that they were lawfully made under it and so their importation fell outside the scope of Section 602. However, the Court went on to consider whether any policy considerations required modification of this approach. It concluded that they did not. But in the course of this consideration it did discuss the situation of copies made lawfully under the copyright laws of other countries, for example where British and United States publishers have rights in the same book and took the view that in such a case copies produced by the British publisher were "lawful" but not "lawfully made under this [statute]" and so the owner of the distribution rights in the United States could prevent the import of copies of the work produced by the British publisher.