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Attorney Sues eBay over Negative Feedback
Mephie writes "MSNBC is running a story on an attorney who is suing ebay over negative feedback a seller left about him. It sounds like a classic case of buyer leaves negative feedback for seller; seller responds accordingly. The plaintiff claims he'd not be filing the suit if he didn't feel ebay's policy needs revision, stating 'They can control content and for them to fail to do so is unconscionable.' Yeah. That's great."
Is this an underhanded way of getting ebay to pay tax? And the rest of it a smoke screen?
Last summer I stopped selling on eBay. I had been selling since Nov of 97 to make a few bucks on the side. I'd probably sold 2000-3000 items and 99% of the transactions went perfectly. Over that summer I had a huge number of people leaving me feedback for totally bogus reasons. People would pay with a money order with no return address and no note of what it was for even though I e-mail out detailed instructions. When I didn't mail the item (since I didn't know what the payment was for) they would just leave negative feedback without e-mailing me first. I would also get negative feedback from people a week after they made payments. They claimed I had failed to ship items even though these people were paying for parcel post mailing which takes up to 2 week sometimes. I think that there is a new wave of people on eBay that forget they are dealing with people and not businesses. Remember catalogs quote 4-6 weeks. Dont expect a week off ebay. If you need it the next day go to CompUSA or Fry's and pay full price. If you dont want to pay full price dont expect lightning fast delivery and perfect items. They're on eBay for a reason.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
eBay doesn't censor user feedback, so wouldn't they be considered "common carrier" and therefore immune from liability for libel?
--
There is no hatred more pure and true than that expressed by children.
Personally I find people take online opinions too lightly.. For instance, if a lawyer named Joe Lawyer were selling items on ebay, and someone left slanderous bad feedback, a google search for "joe lawyer" could producer the page with the bad feedback. If someone was considering hiring Joe lawyer, but did a google search first, they might reconsider hiring him as a result of the bad feedback on ebay. Now if the feedback is warranted, it's a different situation, but the people who leave the negative feedback would have to provide concrete evidence that what they wrote was true, including official documentation (word of mouth doesn't count).
It is hard to patch up one's reputation after it has been slandered, and the Internet is a global medium that reaches the entire world! Personally I feel there should be more cases like this just to make a point: Online slander is illegal and cannot be tolerated!
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
I'm pretty sure this guy was the lawyer for Bernie Shifman about eighteen months ago.
Actually, I figured it was only a matter of time before this happened. I believe eBay does caution you to state your complaints concisely and accurately, without letting it reflect negatively on the individual themself. (I don't recall the exact wording, but they do try to warn you about it right before you leave a feedback comment.)
I can see how it could be taken as libel/slander if a negative comment was left in a certain manner.
Generaly, it's been my observation that the feedback feature is very useful, but needs to be taken with a few grains of salt, too. I know I've had times where I wanted to warn others of a problem with a produce being sold, but didn't want to completely "slam" the seller - so I left neutral feedback. Sometimes, this seems to anger the sellers so they retaliate by leaving me negative feedback for no good reason.
(EG. I recently bought 4 sticks of memory for a PowerMac 7600. The eBay seller said the memory being sold would work in a 7500, 7600, or several other Mac models. When the RAM arrived, it was not the right type for my 7600. I was able to get an RMA for a quick refund of my money (good!), but the inflated shipping price I initially paid was *not* refunded. In essence, I was out over $20 because of an incorrect statement on the auction listing.) I left a neutral feedback to warn others that it didn't really work in 7600's - and the seller left me negative feedback saying "Don't use feedback for this! Use our RMA process." (Duh!)
This guy is obviously a product of the "I-can't-take-responsibility-for-my-actions" generation. If someone gave him negative feedback, then he should act to rectify the situation immediately, not sue the messenger. That's like suing the ISP that allowed someone to send you a bad breath notification. hahaa
So I guess this is just pointing out that anything anyone says on any site you have control over is your responsibility. You are responsible for verifying any and all statements for truth to protect yourself from being sued. Is this the way its supposed to be?
Somehow, I think Ebay gets a lot of baseless complaints from people about feedback left by other members. So why would this one be any different? Did he come to them with concrete evidence that the comment was untrue? I didn't read anything like that. Do they have the right or responsibility to moderate what are essentially opinions? I think not.
Why does everyone seem to think that just because a message is hosted by a company, that they should be responsible for its content? If you have a problem with what someone is saying about you, you SUE THEM. If someone spraypaints totally untrue statements about me on the sidewalk, who am I going to sue? According to this guy, the city is responsible because its their sidewalk. Come on people, think before you sue.
I nominate you Robert Grace, for biggest douche in the world. (ok, maybe not biggest, but you're still a douche. enough southpark reference for today...)
One more thing though, about this sales tax plan. WHAT? Ebay sells nothing, so there is nothing to tax right? Unless their services are taxable, this is just pointless fluff to throw at them.
It happened to me as well. I bought a router that was marketed as "clean" and "cosmetically perfect" as well as "don't have facilities to test". What I received was a router that had been dropped from a high shelf. I emailed the seller and received no response. I asked eBay for the insurance payment that goes with the sales since what I bought was not what was received. Finally on the last day I could, after getting no response from the seller, I left negative feedback. The response from the seller was not an just an acrid email blast, but a feedback message indicating that I had wasted his time and he had other buyers that were interested in the router, just short of actually saying, but implying that I backed out of the purchase (after I sent payment out within minutes of the auctions close BTW).
...) The seller had a greater than 100 rating, mostly from buying bulk CD-rs and burners ... I reported the piracy and turned the CD-Rs over to the manufacturer, who turned them over to the police, and got zip in compensation, not even a coupon for the cost of my postage to mail them the material and cover my photocopy costs for the various receipts. They also never returned the originals. And because I was asked not to disclose the particulars of the investigation, could not ask eBay to cover the purchase (even though eBay knew of the case, they wanted the material, now evidence, to process the claim...). So, yeah, eBay is convienient, but really examine the feedback and expect to be burnt occasionally. And, Postal Money orders are your friends, then you can skip the locals and report incidents to the Postmaster General's office who actually will do something about postal service related crimes. Done ranking, back to the news...
eBay refused to payout (never mind the photo in the ad clearly shows the two devices to be the same router, the damage made non-obvious through the lighting and angle of the photo, way to critical for it to have been coincidental), so their word is worthless, and even confronted with the evidence would not remove the negative feedback, which they should have by their own guidelines in the safeharbor portion of their site at the time.
So I say, I hope this guy wins. eBays feedback system is not to be trusted (I bought so supposedly retail software that arrived without documentation on CD-R with the serial numbers as a text file burnt on the disk
6 months ago I would have said this guy is a crackpot like everyone else on the forum -- but then a complete idiot left me negative feedback on my 200th or so sale on eBay -- the only neg I've ever gotten.
This is what happened: Newbie buyer provides mailing address (this is for a Half.com transaction BTW -- where Half is a huge middleman in the operation) of something like 100 North St., with ZIP code, etc. I ship the item Media Mail as specified... 2 weeks later it comes back to me No Such Address. I file a trouble report with Half.com. Hear nothing. File two more. Hear nothing. Eventually after 3 weeks have passed, the newbie tracks me down and angrily wants to know where his package is. I tell him what happened, and by this time I've already fully refunded his money. He is completely oblivious to what's going on -- does not believe I shipped the package (I even scanned the envelope and forwarded the original order with his bogus address -- "That's not my address!" he tells me...) All to no avail. He dings me with a negative feedback claiming I didn't ship the item.
Eventually I take this up with eBay but apparently the guy has been such a nuisance his account has been deleted. They won't do a thing about it, even though a dozen emails explain the situation... and after several weeks even the buyer says he FINALLY understands what happened and will remove the negative feedback. Alas, he's been deleted, so he can't remove it.
I sell a lot of junk on Half and eBay and though I have a 240something rating, there are some buyers who simply will not bid if you have a single negative rating. I can certainly understand that, and I may or may not take the time to dig down as to why negative points were received. I don't blame the idiot for giving me the negative point -- I blame eBay for not employing common sense in removing it.
The lawsuit is right in that the policy is totally unworkable and is abused frequently. His call for fictitious business names and tax collecting might be a bit much, and in the end I doubt this guy will win his case. What will have far more effect is when a similar case becomes a class action lawsuit -- and then eBay might finally realize how rife the system is with abuse.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
As a Russian all I can say is if your courts take this case its a sad thing. Here civil cases almost never go anywhere. The government can kill 129 people in a botched rescue attempt and they arent responsible for a thing. In America Ebay refuses to fix some pricks feedback and he sues them! Yeah life is fair. Frankly lawsuits are generally a good thing. In Russia they are rare and that is the single bigest cause for Russias problems there is no way to resolve problems without bribing someone in the government. So ultimately I dont know if lawsuits are goof or bad. They create a financial burden on society since unproductive people can sue productive institutions for vast sums, but they do address problems that otherwise would fester and ultimately destabilize society. Russia is slowly developing a workable civil law system, but its years away.
So rather than change the entire Internet, why not consider carefully what you do online. We spend our young lives dealing with conflict resolution only to get online and regress back to age two. Sheesh, why do people do this?
/. Sure, this is a smart move because now everyone knows and will pass judgement far more easily. Kind of hard to undo that one now isn't it?
This guy is acting the fool. Before ebay, nobody heard of him and whatever reputation he has was of little consequence to anyone but the locals in his area.
After the ebay transaction, a few more people get to know him but are very likely not to care. Sure you can bring up the google thing, but I think that is far less important than this guy makes it out to be. So, he quits ebay, or changes id, or some combination of the two along with a short explanation about his side of the story. Wait a while and it all goes away.
After seeing this would you seriously consider that minor exchange to be an issue? I would not because I understand how the Internet works and would consider the matter accordingly like any sane adult would.
Now he files suit and makes the front page of
Would you hire him now?
It is not reasonable to change the workings of the Internet just to make it easier for people like this to exist online because they are the problem, not the structure of the Internet.
Put another way, this is a people problem, not an Internet problem. When you have large groups interacting this will happen and everyone knows it.
This guy should have considered some advice before doing anything rash over something as minor as an ebay negative feedback. If he had, the obvious consequences would likely have resulted in some other course of action than this lawsuit...
Blogging because I can...
Let me get this straight -- it is Ebay's fault that a seller can't keep straight what he has sold and ends up not being able to associate payments with auction. And what gall: to complain about buyers who have the termerity to give negative feedback when the item they paid for never arrived!
They could call the people involved "assholes" and "motherfuckers" and say that the hoaxes were "bullshit". Go fig.
An interesting first episode, by the way. Probably worth following.
As a seller, I can see how ONE negative comment in my 1500 affects some bidders/sellers opinions. I have 10 negatives. Some are unfair comments. (IE, "Broke after a couple of uses" - how that's my fault, I have no idea) I think ALL negatives should be be "warned" and then posted 30 days later if no mutual resolve. For instance. If I want to post a negative, I should have to go through the same laborious process a seller has to go through to get a fees credit. That system prevents mass fraud because it is COMPLICATED. Often negative feedbacks and Neutrals for that matter are posted hastily and emotionally. I think if the negative poster had to wait 7 days for a response and then another 10 days for the comment to post (maybe a time for the receipient of the negative to work something out with Squaretrade) a lot of problems could be avoided.
One thing I have come to realize is that there are just rear ends every 1000 or so people. It doesn't matter what went right and what you can do, you are wrong and a scammer. The problem is, when people with big wallets and even bigger mental and social instability are able to get something in the media's eye and they lash out against eBay - it HURTS MY SALES TOO.
Have I done everything right on eBay? No. Have I made mistakes? yes. Have I learned anything? Yes. I encourage all to read and actually learn from my eBay ME page. I have been on eBay almost since it's inception. I find the issue of this article and the previous article about "scamming on eBay" very informative. I hope you find my eBay ME page informative as well and how I typically can avoid feedback problems. Also note how I handle my feedback by actually clicking on the number next to my name.
http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/adzoox
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
A couple years ago, I accidentally gave a seller a "negative" feedback rating when I had meant to click on "neutral". eBay refused to let me retract my own comment, and neither the seller nor I was happy with the result.
I suspect the "no retractions" policy is mostly a way for eBay to save money in their customer service department.
The best way to do it is to figure out how much it will cost to send BEFORE hand, and be as upfront as possible with your buyer. I was selling some GeForce 3 Ti200's a year ago and I listed all the prices as they were, albeit rounded up to the nearest dollar for convenience's sake. Call the post office and ask how much it'll cost to send, ask about insurance if you're sending expensive, possibly fragile items, etc. And then on your auction give them all the options, would you like insurance? how quickly do you want it to arrive, etc.
This does not take as much work as it sounds like (christ, I'm sure USPS/UPS/FedEx have this information on their webpage if you can sift through it all), AND it leaves the buyer feeling satisfied that you actually give a rat's ass about them, with very little extra work involved.
1. Feedback is generally far more important to sellers - negative feedback can be awfully damaging, especially if you've worked a while to build up your reputation. 2. "Feedback wars" - posting negative feedback can lead to retaliation from the postee. This is a serious disincentive when considering posting negative feedback, and it's quite possible many people don't leave feedback if they have a reputation to protect..they just avoid future transactions with the person in question. One idea that I had was to have ebay periodically purchase something from each auctioneer, and check for quality (at random intervals), masquerading as a regular buyer. The terms of ebay's contract would of course let ebay return the item at no charge. This would let ebay say that they had made a good faith effort to maintain quality, at any rate.
I left negative feedback for a guy who was advertising a somewhat rare anime calendar, but what arrived was a CDR with some scanned pictures of a calendar.
Asked for my money back, with the threat of going to ebay - he gave me back my auction cost, but not the shipping. I claimed that I wouldn't be out 12$ if it wasn't for him - I complained to ebay, but they claimed his seller rating proved he was a good seller.
Anyhow - after leaving negative feedback saying that the auction description was fraudulent he wrote back saying "Yeah....whatever! >8^P"
Out of prinicple I would have sued this guy if I had the money since what he did was pratically mail fraud (which the postmaster - according to what he said to me is where what someone says your getting is different that what you are actually getting)
I remember in the 80s when software companies tried to enforce DRM...and ran head-first into the will of their customers. So they gave it up for a few years but now it's back.
So what's the threshold that must be reached before companies, organizations, and lawmakers realize that they're pissing people off? I was too young to care back in the 80's...I just bought whatever cartridge allowed me to make backups of my C64 games and pressed on. But there must have been some point at which the software companies realized that they were wasting more money on ineffectual copy-protection schemes than they were making on legitimate software sales.
I wonder if any of you folks with more historical background can offer some insight about issues like this. This E-Bay case is barratry. I'm sure there have been eras in the past where lawyers ran amok, else there wouldn't even be a word such as barratry. So at what point does Joe_Everyman and Sue_Everywoman get pissed off enough to spout off?
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
It is illegal to advertise a "shipping" cost of $10 when the actual "shipping" cost is only $5, and then charge the buyer (on eBay or through or a catalog or anywhere) the full advertised $10.
However, long ago retailers figured out the loophole: lump "shipping" and "handling" together as one charge. Then you can quote (and charge) the highest possible shipping cost, and if the shipping actually ends up being any less, well, that was "handling."
This is completely common practice in the catalog industry (among others). It's not at all unique to eBay, and completely legal -- provided that "shipping and handling" and not just "shipping" is quoted.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Honestly, I'm not surprised by this. eBay has had a poorly implemented feedback system for quite a while now. The main problem with feedback, is that the other guy gets to see the feedback you left right away. This causes 2 problems.
Firstly, no one wants to be the first to leave feedback, since they are then helpless to react if they leave nice feedback and get bad feedback in return. Secondly, the idea that you can retaliate to the feedback you were given is completely fucked.
The best way to fix eBay's feedback system is to make a transaction's feedback completely invisible until the transaction is fully completed. That means that you don't get to see what feedback the other guy is leaving you until you've BOTH left feedback. This keeps everyone honest. If the deal goes sour in one person's eyes, then it will be reflected appropriately.
The biggest drawback to this system is the ability to stall feedback from showing. By never leavnig feedback, you could effectively keep a transaction in limbo. Thus, if you knew you fucked the other guy over, you could easily just never leave feedback and your rating would be unaffected. The solution to this is to enforce a timelimit on feedback. Once the other person leaves feedback, you have 30 days to leave feedback of your own. If you let the time limit pass, then you are assumed to have left neutral feedback, and a nice generic comment. Something like "".
Anyways, until eBay fixes this, I pretty much ignore the raw numbers that feedback provides. The aggregate data is completely useless. *shrug* Maybe they'll catch a clue and fix it one day.
Recently, I've started to listen to Jim Cramer, a (egotistical but successful) financial analyst who also happened to be a stock analyst on CNBC in the late 1990s... up until the point when he gave a "bad" review of a certain tech company, and told the viewers to sell.
The company in question sued him for slander, went to his managers at the station, and pressured them to fire him... he was released from the show for trumped up reasons because of the pending lawsuit. After a big public farce, he was found innocent, but they ruined his public career for a good 2 years... up until the point when the company went bankrupt, because they really were a crappy company, and just didn't want anyone to look at what was going on behind the curtain. As we know now, there never was a "tech boom", no economic prosperity of the late 90s, because all of it was lies on paper, and all those startups were counting on the fact that noone was looking.
So in this case, we have an entity who is providing a review of a service, who in their opinion happens to be bad. Reviewee is now taking legal action against the reviewer to silence the opinion, with no regard to whether or not the review is factual or not. I can't help it if I get a feeling of deja vu... "Our service is great! No really, do you see any complaints?"
Having read the article, this little snippet near the bottom provided much food for thought.
"The lawsuit also demands that buyers and sellers, who use aliases in eBay transactions, register their screen names with the state of California as fictitious business names, and that eBay be forced to collect state sales tax."
Interesting! Now, ignoring the fact that the buyer was a lawyer, and taking into account that the whole spat is alleged to have started simply because of comments in the 'Feedback' areas, why in the Multiverse would the filer of this lawsuit want to use it to try and force two other requirements that are (in my view) utterly irrelevant to the original issue?
Perhaps someone should have a look at any connections Mr. Grace may have to the State of California's Franchise Tax Board, or other California state politicians, direct or otherwise.
On a more personal note: I sincerely hope this is one lawyer that loses his case, big time! Regardless of the condition of the magazines, it sounds like he does indeed need to "get a life." I know from direct experience that it is simply not possible to sell for more than a year or so on Ebay and -not- get a negative feedback or two. It Just Doesn't Happen that way.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
It's this kind of "lawsuit" that is turning the US into a joke and killing it's industry.
I've said it before in this thread, and got modded as flamebait. Go ahead and mod me down again. Karma is useless, and I don't give a rat's fat ass whether I offend the so-called "lawyer" involved.
Any societal leech who thinks this kind of lawsuit deserves anything but being laughed out of court with court costs levied against the suitor deserves to suffer the economic damages the US is working it's way up to.
Here's one finger on high for the lawyer who initiated this case. Another for those who were offended that I challenge the useless sack of flesh to try such a lawsuit outside the US. And a third for anyone stupid enough to think this is an anti-American rant. And a pair for anyone else wasting society's time through such frivolous self-serving bullshit lawsuits.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There's really no such thing as "libelous words". If you're sued for libel/slander, the biggest defense is the truth. If you say your nextdoor neighbor is a whore and she sues you, show the judge a video tape of a different guy arriving at her house every night and leaving every morning.
If you call a seller "dishonest" on eBay and he sues you, bring up the auction where he said "These magazines are in mint condition!" and then show the judge the crappy condition the magazines were in. You're not being libelous if you're telling the truth.
I don't know why MSNBC points out the "This man should be banned from eBay" comment, because that is obviously opinion. That's not libel by any stretch of the imagination. It's when you try to pass something off as fact that you get into a risky area.
In this case, the word "dishonest" isn't libelous if the guy was in fact dishonest. If he said he was selling you something in one condition and it ended up being in a different condition, you could consider that dishonest. However, the "all the way" part worries me more. That seems to say "EVERYTHING he said regarding this was a lie." The lawyer could point out the things he WAS honest about and therefore say the "all the way" part was not true.
However, I don't think the lawyer would win if this case went to trial. Judges are usally very big on free speech, and you have to have a damn good case if you're gonna sue someone for libel or slander and win. I don't know if a one liner on eBay about someone being dishonest is a very good case.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com