Many eBay sellers, including dealers, continually infringe our IP (Intellectual Property) rights by using our copyright images. We invest considerable time and money in our photographs, and do not appreciate their misappropriation by eBay members or others, especially when they are using our efforts to compete with us.
Find More Items From the Same Seller
eBay sellers who use the 'Find More Items From the Same Seller' feature risk having multiple listings cancelled if they use copyright images without permission.
Depending on your feedback score or other status, you may have "More Items From the Same Seller" included at the end of your completed listings. This is one of eBay's marketing tools, which you can use to cross-promote your other, and current items. It's also there to help eBay earn more in commissions, and possibly help potential buyers to find similar items.
So, What's the Problem?
There is no problem with using "Marketing Tools" when listing on eBay, except that if you are a copyright thief, it might come back to bite you!. We will explain:-
- Let's assume you have some gold coins to sell, perhaps a Krugerrand and a few sovereigns.
- If difficult to get good photographs of coins without specialised equipment, some knowledge and experience in macro photography, and also in using Adobe Photoshop or some other image editing software.
- You decide to use one or more of our high quality photographs, without asking our permission, to save yourself time and effort, and use the photos to offer your item or items on eBay.
- We notice the stolen image, report it to eBay, and get the listing removed.
- Unfortunately, because your listings use the "Find More Items From the Same Seller" feature, our image also appears on all, or many of, your other listings, including completed items. To protect and enforce our IP rights, we report each and every instance of copyright abuse.
- eBay are sometimes slow to remove infringing material, or fail to remove it at all (evidence available - we are currently in process of commencing legal action against eBay). Since this occurred, we have implemented a new policy of reporting all the related and completed items first, and only report the current listings after they have completed.
- If you are unhappy with any of this, we suggest you contact eBay, to tell them the problem, and suggest they change their systems, although we would be surprised if you can:
- Contact them.
- Get any relevant or helpful response from them.
- Persuade them to change their systems.
Other Items Whenever these gallery images happen to be our copyright images, we exercise our legal rights, and report the offending listings to eBay's VeRO department. What happens then is up to eBay. It tends to be one of about four things:-
- eBay remove all the listings we have reported.
- eBay tell us they cannot understand why we are reporting the listings, we tell them, and they remove the listings.
- eBay tell us they cannot understand why we are reporting the listings, we tell them, and they remove only the listings which directly contain the copyright material, and leave alone the ones which we reported. This option causes least inconvenience to their vendor, but it requires the application of a little intelligence and effort by eBay.
- eBay remove only the listings which directly contain the copyright material, and leave alone the ones which we reported. This option causes least inconvenience to their vendor, but it requires the application of a little intelligence and effort by eBay, without asking us.
As most eBay members will know if they have ever had a problem, eBay have a problem communicating. Even when they appear to be trying to be helpful, it's often difficult to understand what they actually mean. In the first two cases above, they send the vendor an-e-mail saying the listing have been remove at our request, because they infringe our copyright, and suggest that the vendor contacts us if they want further information. We think this stinks. eBay should have the guts to tell its customers at this point about copyright, instead of passing the buck back to the rights owners. It's bad enough that their members have stolen our images, without eBay telling them to contact us for explanations.
Auto- Responder
However, a long time ago, we created an autoresponse e-mail, which does explain about Intellectual Property Rights, and point to a few pages of one of our websites for even more information. The autoresponse also informs the recipient not to expect a further answer unless they contact us further stating their actual real name and address, together with their eBay ID. It also tells them that we are entitled to take legal action, and to charge fees for the unauthorised use. We take the opportunity to warn them that if their original e-mail was offensive, unpleasant, or belligerent, then this may affect our judgement when deciding what further action to take.
Most don't bother to make further contact. A few send an apology, but hardly ever reveal their full contact details, which incidentally we are entitled to request from eBay (otherwise we would have no choice but to hold eBay legally responsible).
Listing Policy Breaches
In the last two cases above, eBay cannot fairly tell their member that we have requested the removal, as we avoid reporting the directly infringing items until later. So they have to tell their customer that it is because their listings "Breaches eBay Listing Policy", neither can they tell their member to ask us why, and they have to do this job themselves. We have never yet seen a typical e-mail they send their member in these circumstances, but we guess it is pretty uninformative, as are most communications from eBay. Of course, it's almost impossible to get in direct touch with eBay, and certainly frustrating at the best of times.
We are happy enough with this outcome, as the two parties which are party to the IP rights infringement have only each other for company, if they want to eyeball each other, that's fine by us.
If eBay got their finger out and gave their customer some real useful information, it could help prevent or at least discourage the member from repeating their errant behaviour, but we guess that eBay don't manage to do this, as the almost inevitable result is that the vendor keeps using our images, and keeps getting reported. Nobody tells him why, he is left to work it out for himself. We do not see it is our job to train and educate eBay vendors.
Of course, when we later report the directly infringing items, and eBay remove those as well, you might think that even the thickest of plonkers would be able to work it all out.
Auctiva, eBay & Copyright Theft
We suggest you read this link if you use Auctiva.
Copyright Notice Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.
Some Copyright Thieves on eBay
Alphabetical Listing of Other Copyright Theft Sites
Other Web Sites All comments about copyright also cover content of all our other websites including, but not limited to:-
- Chards
www.chards.co.uk - Investment Gold Bars & Coins (This Site)
taxfreegold.co.uk - General Coins & Jewellery:
www.24carat.co.uk - Gold Sovereigns:
goldsovereigns.co.uk - 18 Carat Gold Jewellery:
www.18carat.co.uk - 9 Carat Gold Jewellery:
www.9carat.co.uk
Treasureminx eBay Listing 150238295224
Reverse of 1974 Krugerrand As Used by Treasureminx
32 - 36 Harrowside, Blackpool, Lancashire, FY4 1RJ, England. Telephone (44) - (0) 1253 - 343081; Fax 408058;
E-mail: Contact Us The URL for our main page is: taxfreegold.co.uk