eBay Copyright Thieves & Crooks Named and Shamed
It's dishonest to copy photographs, and misleading to buyers.
sadie1938 Using Copied Sovereign Images on eBay
eBay seller sadie1938 of Battle, East Sussex, United Kingdom, not only stole our 1895 Sydney Mint Old Head Victoria Sovereign Reverse image without permission, but failed to tell buyers her coin was not the same coin.
High eBay Feedback is No Guarantee of Integrity or Honesty
When we wrote this page, this eBay member's feedback was 90; with 100% positive according to eBay.
It also demonstrates that high eBay feedback is no indicator of honesty.
Sample Listing
1895 Sovereign
1895 Sovereign from Victoria in Excellent Condition
Payment PayPal or Cleared Cheque
What's Wrong?
We invest a great deal of time, effort, and cost into creating some of the best photographic coin images on the internet. We strongly object when lazy and dishonest people decide to use them without a by your leave or thanks, doing so in competition with us.
Copyright theft is dishonest. We recommend you avoid doing business with dishonest dealers.
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Seller ID | Item Number | Date | Description | Price
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sadie1938 | 30412400115 | 20th Jul 2010 | 1895 Sovereign | �170
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Price
The seller was asking a starting price of �170 for this item.
Whatever the items "sell" for, after eBay's greedy 10% selling fees, and possible PayPal charges, the crook may have been much better off selling the coins to us, instead of stealing our photographs.
Image Persistence
Sometimes eBay sellers change their photographs part way through a listing. This may be for a number of reasons.
What they appear to realise is that thumbnail copies of the original gallery photograph often persist even though the corresponding photographs in the item listing have been changed or removed. These thumbnail images are used by eBay in cross-marketing, and cross-promoting items on their site, particularly the original item. They appear on the "Recently Viewed" items section, and possibly in other places such as the "similar items" sections. As copyright owners we are entitled to have unauthorised copies of our photographs removed without unnecessary delay.
Whatever the reason, we believe it is correct for us to report the item and member to eBay. Also if eBay have any ethical standards, we would hope they would want to know which members breach copyright. It is our experience that people stealing copyright images often make fraudulent attempts to sell goods which they do not own, or to misrepresent the quality of items they do own by showing photographs of higher quality goods in better condition, and therefore more valuable. We believe this is also misleading and fraudulent. This is one reason why we believe eBay should wish to be informed about copyright infringement, even where it has been rectified or partially rectified.
eBay's VeRO department almost always contest and obstruct our reports and rights whenever we report items where the vendor has changed images on his actual listing , but where copies of the images persist on the eBay system, and are published to members of the public by eBay because the original listing itself has not been removed.
End Listing Early
We believe it would be better if infringing vendors removed their item(s) by ending the listing early. They could actually state the reason as copyright infringement, but never do so.
Even then, the listing can still be viewed as a "Completed listings" item. Because of this, there should exist a mechanism whereby a vendor can request eBay to completely purge his listing with all photographs, images, and thumbnails from their system, so that further copyright infringement is not continued.
eBay appear to fail to provide such a mechanism, and appear not to include any advice to vendors about this, and we believe this failing demonstrates negligence and lack of care on the part of eBay.
Two Birds With One Stone
As we wrote this page, we viewed our eBay home page, which showed not one but two items in the "Recently Viewed" section, both of which previously used our images, both of which had changed their images, both both of which had persistent thumbnails which could be viewed by us, and by other eBay viewers.
We have shown a close up of our screenshot of this page.
The other item, a 1947 Swiss Gold 20 Francs, is from a listing by eBay member kastriotis, and is the subject of not one, but two pages on our website, which explain how a Swiss gold gold transmutes into a can of worms:
eBay Guilty of Negligence or Complicity
We will be reporting this example of copyright abuse using our standard Statutory Declaration via the eBay VeRO programme, and wait to see if they chose to action or ignore our report. We look forward to taking legal action against eBay for their negligence and / or complicity if they fail to take down the offending material promptly.
Selling Gold Sovereigns & Other Coins on eBay
We point out that sellers may often get more money, for less effort, by selling to a specialised dealer, such as us, rather than via eBay.
Copyright Notice
Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.
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