Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

yes, first sale applies to GPL code as well.

If it didn't you would see people sueing wallmart, best buy, etc instead of Cisco (after all, you probably didn't buy the netgear access point directly from Cisco.

Looking at this from another way.

If someone doesn't copy anything, then there is no way for a copyright license to apply.

So if you were to buy devices with GPL code in them, not copy anything, and sell them again, there is no way that a copyright license can force you to do anything as you are not making any copy.

What "first sale" would _not_ give you is any right to make copies of the GPL code

This doesn't help the supplier problem because the supplier isn't providing you with a separate copy of the binary for each device, they are giving you source code (or a file binary) that you then copy on to each device.