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Posted By: warshawlaw

Intellectual property rights owners have been emboldened by the RIAA's success with the file sharing sites, who also claim to only be a middleman but who have been slaughtered because they knew what was going on and did nothing to prevent it. I think that is the direction Tiffany's is going. The issue is whether and when a "neutral" party, knowing it is enabling a crime or fraud, has the duty to step in and stop it. I think we passed the point of plausible deniability a long time ago with ebay. Fact is, ebay is undoubtedly aware that there is a ton of fraudulent crap being sold through its site, yet it does nothing about it and it profits mightily from it. How many complaints have members of this board made to ebay over the years? And the result is...paper cut out crap sold as cards in the graded cards section of ebay, fake Wagners by the dozens, "selling as a reprint" so common that it should have its own category, etc.

All of the suggestions made in this string are, with all due respect, not that hard to figure out; it strains credibility to believe that ebay cannot figure them out too. If you have thousands of complaints, millions of dollars of losses, thousands of victims, entire web sites devoted to ebay scams and frauds, large corporate profits, and a company that does none of the easily implemented disclosure and/or monitoring steps that we can brainstorm, it is only a matter of time before someone with sufficient skin in the game gets angry enough to file a case and push it to the end.