British Museum to Police eBay UK at Taxpayers' Expense

[mandy]

British Museum experts will monitor eBay antiquities sales and report illegal activity to the Met's Art and Antiques Unit in an arrangement announced today.

The initiative will try and tackle the problem of potentially academically valuable artefacts being traded...

eBay isn't handing over any cash to the taxpayer-funded museum to monitor its auctions. There's a memorandum of understanding though, so that's good.

The irony of the British Museum - repository of Empire plunder of immeasurable significance to its creator people - acting as eBay's antiquities exploitation watchdog is not lost on us...

full article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/03/...sh_museum/

After months of negotiation, agreement was reached yesterday between the online auction site eBay, the British Museum, and the government's Museums, Libraries and Archives council, to control the booming trade in British antiquities on the site...

In the past eBay has refused to take objects off the site unless the experts could prove they were stolen or illicitly obtained - which is often impossible when sellers insist they cannot remember exactly where they bought the objects years earlier, or that they were bought overseas...

The site has now formally agreed to allow a Portable Antiquities scheme to monitor such sales, and also to direct buyers and sellers to a code of conduct, reminding both of their responsibilities...

full article: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,...49,00.html