Game Companies Sue Yahoo!

Splitzy writes, "Nintendo of America, Sega of America, and Electronic Arts filed a joint class action suit yesterday against Yahoo! for the sale of illegal and counterfeit game products. They say that Yahoo! profits from these sales and is fully aware of the illegal activities. For the full story click here."

Comments

Why Yahoo is liable

[Brento]

I used to be roommates with a guy who sold bootleg concert CD's for a living. Ebay has a few employees that proactively search for illegal items like bootlegs, and they're so effective that the guy could only put bootlegs up for auction on the weekend, when the staff wasn't working. When a staff member finds you selling bootlegs, they can (and do) cancel all of your current auctions - not just the one auction they found.

In addition, Ebay lets you e-mail these "policemen" and tell them about illegal items, and they'll take action.

Yahoo doesn't do any proactive checking whatsoever. You can inform Yahoo that auction #123 is an illegal bootleg CD, and they don't stop it. Most of the time, they don't even acknowledge you. They never penalize you, and they certainly never cancel your account - he's been using the same one since auctions.yahoo.com got started.

I can see why Yahoo is doing it - they're trying to capture market share in any way possible, and let's face it, if they offer cool stuff that Ebay won't allow, then people will get interested. If you browse through Yahoo's auctions, you can find pretty much any bootleg on the planet, and a decent selection of pirated software.

Yahoo is getting hit up by these guys because they (Yahoo) are totally irresponsible about the legality of what they're allowing their users to auction off. Somebody could probably put slaves up there and sell them. Come to think of it...