Slashdot Mirror

Serendipitously, eBid.net officially launched today in the U.S. See the news here. Their fees are far, far lower, and they want to grab all the customers eBay is going to lose.

all it cuts out (apart from patent trolls) are defensive patent portfolios and small research houses which attempt to develop and then sell ideas.

But that's a huge deal. Basically then, if you're an inventor, you're screwed. Let's say you come up with a way to increase the efficiency of jet engines. According to this, unless you actually plan on selling jet engines, you've got no way to enforce your patent. You can offer to sell the patent to a jet manufacturing company, but why should they buy it from you, since you've got no leverage over them? They can just go ahead and use your invention, and since you don't actually manufacture jet engines yourself, you can't stop them.

And that's more or less what happened to MercExchange, at least according to this article. eBay came to them to offer to buy their portfolio, but really they were just looking it over to see if they could get away with violating it. And after eBay's legal team looked things over, they simply decided to pull a Microsoft and totally violate the portfolio with no compensation. And make no mistake, they did violate it, as decided by a jury. They're simply hoping at this point that they can render moot the jury verdict by getting the underlying patents invalidated.

Make no mistake here. eBay are the bad guys here. MercExchange aren't a patent troll company - they've got a homegrown portfolio and in my opinion deserve to have their ideas protected, insofar as ideas should be protected at all. If you want to rail against software or business method patents in general, maybe you're right, but let's start with the big fishes' huge portfolios first before we go after the guppies.

Hey, you must also remember that they tried to close half down in 2004. The user base rallied to keep it open, and it is still going strong.

Half is unique in that it handles credit card payments for you, has an item catalog that looks up titles & ISBNs, has no listing fee (just a percentage of cost), and is a good way to get positive feedback, as every purchase is lumped into ebay's system. It's out there, just under the radar.

I was under the impression that it cost money. I googled for Ebay API and found: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y202/m09/abu00 79/s02 Knowing how ebay charges for everything, I figured this was the case.

They've got a list of qualifications on their site, and the important one is that:

* Whether the payment service has a substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services (new services without such a track record generally cannot be promoted on eBay)

That's been eBay's policy since way before Google came up with this brand new system of theirs. And the fact remains that Google has absolutely no past track record in financial transactions.

Bzzz...Wrong!

Google Checkout has been around for years; it's what they use to transfer money around for AdSense/AdWords. What's new is that they're finally opening it up to be used for any and all services.

Here is an article with an interesting quote from Google, "Google Checkout is not a beta product. Google has a long history in billing and payments for AdWords and for premium services, such as Google Video."

I would wager my entire net worth that eBay knows that Google Checkout is well established. I'm guessing they crapped their pants and reacted with this changed policy. I also heard that they changed their payment policy name from "Safe Payment Policy" to "Accepted Payment Policy" with the addition of Google Checkout to their list of unacceptable payment policies.

As others have said, this is clearly a case where eBay is using their monopoly to control another market, and I sincerely hope that there is restitution. You can bet that I will be using Google Checkout for my auctions on eBay, and if eBay tries to suspend my account, they will be getting a letter from my lawyer (as I'm sure they've already received a few from Google's lawyers).

I believe they are regulated as a bank just like a brick and mortar bank.

You believe incorrectly.

At least thats what I got from this article which is an interview with the guy who owns MercExchange

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m09/i30/s0 1

Since it's IPO on April 30th 2004, Google seems to be testing the waters of a lot of different markets.

Granted, they all center on information technology, this company is ever expanding along different product lines. We've seen Google blogs, Picasa, Analytics, Video, Desktop, Talk, Earth, Toolbar, Gmail, Translate, Mobile, etc. And (thank god), they've all been presented to us rather benignly but are they all considered successes?

And now we observe GBuy, a service to compete with Paypal. Paypal's history has been rocky but they do have a solid foothold as they are almost married with eBay. Will eBay welcome the new GBuy and favor it equally with Paypal?

Google profits around $17 billion a year--do they really need to become a money transfer service? Ebay reports $4.5 billion a year, will they be sharing some of that with Google? Will a cut of that even matter to Google?

What's interesting is to see if they actually take a cut (a la Paypal) or if they just continue Google ads through the pages on the service to pay for all of the legal work that comes with claims and fraud. They have the resources to do it and this would probably kill sites like Paypal that take a 3% or more charge on each transaction.

Looks like MercExchange does and despite eBay not licensing their patents, others have.

Those who are selling their own stuff don't have to register, but those who sell other people's stuff do. That's reasonable enough.

Maybe they're being assholes because they think freenet might land them another "patriot" act violation? Don't see how it would, but the whole 'anonymous' thing might be catching their eye...

Whatever they are thinking, I'm probably going to be closing my PP account out soon...

Interesting point, but nowadays fraud is ignored (eBay, PayPal), there is (almost) no such thing as an illegal wiretap, and privacy is an anachronism.

Heres some more info about this scan in case you're interested:

Sos4auctions.com - Technical details about the scam.
Another Article - in case you DON'T want to support M$ by reading MSNBC.
The company supposedly running the scam - Hehehe... they use a Win2K server... lets see how fast it gets slashdotted :)

Thats all for now, good night everyone!

Charges filed in alleged eBay scam
... Click Here. Charges filed in alleged eBay scam. LA man charged with
26 counts of grand theft. LOS ANGELES, Dec. 4 -- A Los Angeles ...
www.msnbc.com/news/843312.asp?0si=- - 48k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.msnbc.com ]

Fool.com: Fools Team to Fight eBay Scam [News] May 2, 2001
... This way, every time a scam artist tries to take advantage of a seller ... eBay's response
eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove says this particular scam pops up from ...
www.fool.com/news/2001/ebay010502.htm - 30k - Cached - Similar pages

TechTV | Source of EBay Scam Found
... Ebay wants to protect its trademark, but says it's tough to find
criminals like the email scam artist. It's very hard to track ...
www.techtv.com/news/security/story/ 0,24195,3408892,00.html - 38k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

TechTV | EBay Spam Scam
... that's it.. Ebay wants to protect its trademark, but says it's tough
to find criminals like the email scam artist. It's very hard ...
www.techtv.com/news/security/story/ 0,24195,3408463,00.html - 39k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Possible Ebay Scam - www.ezboard.com
... It looks like the scam artist is targeting bigger sellers-not small fry-so if
any of you get an email asking for information-contact ebay about it first. ...
pub131.ezboard.com/ fbliss51092frm48.showMessage?topicID=27.topic - 14k - Cached - Similar pages

Ebay scam artists
... to conferm the info. Scam Artist email, Name, Ebay ID, Offence. mtracker@iland.net,
Mark Campbell, tracker44, sells broken items as new.
www.ctlinx.org/ebay/ - 7k - Cached - Similar pages

A New eBay Bidding Scam?
... Then at the last minute, he writes, the scam-artist could withdraw his high bid ... But
with the eBay system and other Internet bidding systems, that might not be ...
www.auctionbytes.com/pages/abu/y200/m03/abu0009/ s05 - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

Scam artist meets fraud hunter
www.brockmoore.com/Scams/SkylineMovies.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages

PayPal - Internet Info for Real People
... a correction had to be added as MSNBC incorrectly reported the scam artist could
access credit card and bank account information. The eBay community quickly ...
www.thebee.com/bweb/iinfo217.htm - 18k - Cached - Similar pages