Ebay Posts Message About Bootlegs
 

As I was posting an auction, I saw this as I was listing it.

<b> Attention Sellers: Are you about to list a movie or television related item?

Please make sure your item doesn't infringe upon someone's copyrights or violate eBay's policies. As a general rule, the following copies cannot be lawfully sold:


Unauthorized videos and VCDs

Copies of TV shows that you recorded off of television

Oscar or Emmy screeners

35mm or 70mm prints

Movie trailers</b>

We'll see if this cracks down on the boots! Probably not.

Still, it's highly unlikely eBay would do any serious crackdown on bootlegs.

No, but this way ebay can at least claim "we told them not to list that, it's not our fault!"

Just FYI, that message is nothing new... that's been there for at least 2 years whenever you post an auction in the TV/Film category. You get a similar "no pirate material" message if you try to sell software.

i doubt very much it will do anything to stop people from selling bootlegs there

So how do people know if they are bootlegs? I heard that there are very many ways to word it like "Bid on this Beenie Baby and get free copies of Star Wars on DVD"

That message has been there at least since December 1999 when I first started selling on eBay ... and we know how effective it is. -wink-

I just stopped even looking for DVD's on eBay. If you look up any given movie, you'll get three bootlegs, and two original R1 copies.

I saw that message when I opened my auction for the "Land of the Lost VCD set" a few weeks ago. The only problem that ebay had was providing a link to vcdhelp. I could mention VCDHelp, I just couldn't provide an "http://....." url.

So bootleg sellers never usually get into trouble, you're saying? Because there are so many of them? Jeez.... And yet the RIAA and MPAA go after the p2p companies? Maybe I'm just out of the loop....

"So bootleg sellers never usually get into trouble, you're saying? Because there are so many of them? Jeez.... And yet the RIAA and MPAA go after the p2p companies? Maybe I'm just out of the loop...."

Here is there rational....take 1 giant company that supports thousands and thousands of pirates and eliminate it. Now you have thousands of "pirates" that have lost their infrastructure to carry out their "illegal activity". Now the RIAA and other idiot conglomerates forget 1 imporatant thing. You knock down 1 of those companies...read Napster....and 6 more jump up to replace them. If they were smart they'd attack ebay. They are the ones repoducing thousands and thousands of bootlegs a day....and a good percentage of those boot legs are excellent quality as compared to MP3's. But then again most people who pirate or want things for free don't really care about the quality or rarely are able to distinguish the difference.

Now that whole argument goes out the window when you consider the fact that the people who created the RIAA are the same people who have price fixed CDs for the past 20 years. It wasn't until recently that this has changed somewhat.

There's my 2 cents!