eBid makes changes to strengthen its Intellectual Property Infringement Program

[mandy]

One of the burning issues for internet auctions is always the sale of replica and counterfeit goods. I read some posts on our forums about eBid "allowing" or "not doing anything to stop" the sale of counterfeit goods. As most of our users realise and have found out, this is simply not true. We remove hundreds of auctions every single day and with that the sellers of of these items. We are in constant contact with trading standards agencies and worldwide police forces and have helped with the arrest and subsequent conviction of many sellers of counterfeit goods in many countries. This is something I cannot talk about openly here. As well as this we have our own "IPIP" (Intellectual Property Infringement Program) system running that allows any trademark owner to notify us of any suspected fraudulent auctions which are immediately removed.

All auction sites around the world have the same problem when it comes to this matter, if someone could invent the "stop counterfeit goods being sold" switch that could be turned on and off and sell it he/she would be a rich person. The fundamentals of the problems lie far away from the daily dealings of an auction site boss reaching as far as :

Democratic and Human Rights
#The notion of innocent until proven guilty has been a pilar that whole nations have been built around.
#Who has the right to judge a person as a criminal?
#The fundamenetal basic ideas behind buying and selling have to be bought into question here, does a low price ALWAYS 100% Lead to an item being found as not genuine? Of course it doesn't. An authentic Louis Vuitton bag from 5 seasons ago might genuinily be worth £25 today, this defeats that idea that some people have that we can have robots searching for (Louis Vuitton with Reserve less than £25) and automatically removing all these auctions. We would be tarring innocent sellers.
#Is it up to the market landlord or the stall holder to police the sale of these goods? Should there be a second rule book created just for virtual instances of real world scenarios?

to

Foreign and Domestic Policies of some of the biggest and smallest nations on earth.
#Where are counterfeit goods manufactured?
#Who are counterfeit goods being manufactured by?
#Why are counterfeit goods manufactured?
#How are these goods being transported around the world?
#Do governments realise their countries are producing these goods? Do they turn a blind eye?
#Why isn't more done to stop the manufacture of them?
#Who should be doing more, who's job is it?
#Should individual countries be able to take financial action against countries where they are being made?
#Should individual countries be able to take physical action to stop their manufacture?

We've no plans to take over Kofi Annan in the next few months so many of these things are out of our control and as the internet is still such a new medium, many of the laws that would help and guide us in our decision making are still unwritten.

So what do we do? Stick to the tried and trusted policy that has been agreed on by the authorities that sees us act within todays laws, albeit restricting what we can do and not eradicting the problem or do we act as pioneers in the the world of e-commerce and online culture and help get to the root of the problem but risking putting some peoples' noses out of joint and treading on the line of people's basic rights?

Well, waiting on law makers to find solutions to the problem could be an endless wait and something has to be done much sooner that this. Are we the ones to take the lead? We are one of the longest established e-commerce sites in the world and have more experience of this than most people involved in the industry. So after working on things for the past 3 months and talking to many people we are shifting our policy as of this past weekend. To what?... I'm not willing to put this into words but time will be our judge over the next few months as our changes gradually kick into place.

One other addition we will be adding will be the addition of a new field to auctions that are started within certain categories, this will be a simple dropdown with "Authentic" and "Counterfeit" where users will be forced to list an item as being genuine or fake, thus circumventing the loophole that many sellers use to sell counterfeit items by not actually stating one way or the other. This will give authorities the key to making prosecutions stick on nearly every case brought.

That's all for now.
Have a Great Day.
Gazza

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