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eBay Bargains Soon To Be A Thing Of The Past?
ScaredOfTheMan writes to mention that, as expected, companies are utilizing the decision in Leegin Creative Leater Products v. PSKS to force the take-down of auctions on eBay because auctions are priced too low or even stating the auction itself is an infringement of their intellectual property rights.
... in other words, the price which the buyer is willing to pay and which the seller is willing to accept.
Any other kind of pricing is rigged.
Slashdotted already before first post. I am not showing that mirrordot has it either. Anyone have a cached version?
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
I predicted here that companies would soon rely on the Supreme Court's decision in Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS to justify interfering with competition from less expensive products sold online. It did not take long for that prediction to come true. Although interference with eBay sales is nothing new (see here and here), companies in two recently filed federal cases explicitly invoke Leegin as a justification for terminating the eBay auctions of competitors that charge lower prices online. These cases not only show Leegin's likely effect on Internet sales, but are also, unfortunately, fairly typical examples of the sort of anticompetitive actions companies take to fight lower-priced competition online.
In the first case, Merle Norman Cosmetics v. LaBarbera, No. 07-60811 (S.D. Fla.), Merle Norman Cosmetics filed suit against eBay seller Joyce LaBarbera for selling its makeup on eBay at a discount. The company had previously terminated a variety of eBay auctions by claiming that the sale of its makeup violated an unspecified FDA regulation. In this case, however, the company concedes that the eBay seller could rightfully resell the makeup on eBay if, as she claims, she purchased the makeup at a flea market. Merle Norman, however, suspects that the eBay seller is in fact buying the makeup from a salon that, pursuant to its contract with Merle Norman, has agreed not to sell anything on the Internet. Merle Norman says it demands these contracts so that purchasers can only buy the makeup at Merle Norman stores, with the guidance of "beauty consultants" who are "specially trained in proper hygienic practices." Of course, the contracts also help ensure that the products won't be available outside the stores at reduced prices.
Although Merle Norman does not claim that the eBay seller ever contracted with the company, it contends that the seller's act of purchasing the makeup from a salon that had entered such an agreement and then selling "at discount prices" on the Internet constituted unfair competition, interference with its contracts, and civil conspiracy (see complaint). In other words, the eBay seller, according to the company, is guilty of breaching somebody else's contracts and unfairly competing by selling to consumers on the Internet at prices that are too low. In its brief in the district court, Merle Norman relies on Leegin, which had been decided just a few days earlier, in support of its right to "require dealers to charge certain resale prices to promote interbrand competition." The company claims that "the law is well settled that manufacturers like [Merle Norman] have the right to control the manner of distribution of their products." Although the district court denied the pro se defendant's motion for a preliminary injunction, the case is now on track for trial.
The second case is Colon v. Innovate! Technology, Inc., No. 07-21349 (S.D. Fla.). Innovate! Technology ("ITI") is a company that makes high-performance car parts. According to its brief in the district court (warning, large file), the company "sells its products only via authorized distributors and retailers" that "comply with ITI's policy of Minimum Advertised Pricing." The company views sales by unauthorized sellers (i.e., those who sell too cheaply) to be not only a violation of its minimum-price policy, but, surprisingly, as an infringement of its intellectual property rights. ITI's eBay "About Me" page explains that the sale of its products by anyone but an authorized dealer constitutes patent and trademark infringement. Moreover, the company claims the right to prohibit all use of its copyrighted "technical data, photos, graphics, software, product literature, catalogues, product specifications, installation guides, user guides, promotional material and other types of information" without its permission. In other words, the company claims it is copyright infringement to read its user guides and manuals, browse its catalogs, or look at its pictures without its "express written permission." Presumably, the company f
ITI's eBay "About Me" page explains that the sale of its products by anyone but an authorized dealer constitutes patent and trademark infringement
The seller wasn't even under contract. Are they saying that I can't resell a wrench (or shoe) that I just bought? It's MINE! Can the seller selling the makeup get around this by saying that the products are "used"? Like she licked the box or something.
The article reads like FUD.
Uh. Rigging is the whole point of intellectual monopoly law. It's antithetical to free market capitalism. I don't know why you're surprised, america - you're about as capitalist as the soviets were communist.
Much like CDs, the initial purchase should have paid for the "license" to sell the thing however you wish, at whatever price you wish. Of course RIAA would rather each person who touches a CD pay the full purchase price.
I think this will get shot down... or at least we can only hope and pray that it does.
I realize that they're talking about products that the manufacturer WANTS to be sold only a higher prices, not through eBay for a bargain. But you know, if I paid the manufacturer price for an item I should be able to see it however I wish, right?
My first thought after reading this was something like:
"Great, first you can't copy your own CDs, now you can't sell your owm belongings... Before you know you won't be able to even kill yourself".
But then I remembered that suicide is considered a crime in some, if not most of, western countries (like mine, Spain). Too late.
English is not my native language. Corrections are not only welcome but encouraged. Thanks.
-Walenzack.
Seeing that ink prices are likely to surge (again) ...
What happened to the first sale rights? Once you have bought something, are you not supposed to be allowed to sell it at whatever price you like with no interference from the manufacturer or distributor?
Still nothing. I did find some Drew Carey crotch shots, and without my glasses, they're passable for a good Doctorow. Actually, even with my glasses, they're passable. Score!
Yes, they are attempting to block reselling products ... online.
... online ... if they get their way.
No, stating that it is "used" would not circumvent this
The online part is important. It is the online part that is hitting their sales. People can quickly search for lower prices. Certain vendors do NOT like that.
So they hit back with every legal weirdness they can find. You can't use their trademarked names. You can't use photographs of their products. Etc.
It's stupid and it should be shot down. But we'll see how it eventually works out. Right now it's easy for them to win under the DMCA.
But part of me wishes that the majority of consumers in the U.S. would shop based on the quality of products and services, not just the price.
Anecdote:
I've recently been looking in my area (D/FW, Texas) for a reputable consumer electronics dealer - specifically hi-fi equipment. Not too long ago, there were several good places to buy. One of my favorites was Hillcrest Hi-Fi, a local business well-known around here; they were purchased by Tweeter a couple years ago. Fast forward to today - all of the better shops that had knowledgeable people are gone; only Best Buy and Circuit City remain (ugh!).
Long story short:
Due to a combination of grey market "deals" on the Internet, mega-chains buying out local businesses, and the HDTV pricing war, I no longer have any place that will meet my requirements for buying expensive electronic equipment. I don't buy cars over the Internet or from Uncle Al's Cars and Appliances, and I don't buy expensive electronics from places like Best Buy.
I a way, I sympathize with the few places left with a quality product and good service who just want a way to stay competitive and stay in business.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Politicians lay down with corporations. Judges cackle over injustices. The clouds gather.
Anime DVDs go up in price.
Sorry, just feeling apocalyptic today.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Better than a soap opera, bad down side is that there will be a push to make this the norm every where else. What happened to free trade.
BAM! The door splintered off its hinges, and toppled into the room. The cats yowled and scrambled under the furniture. Six police officers with plexiglass masks and riot guns stormed into the room and surrounded Granny's overstuffed floral-patterned armchair.
"Oh, my!" said Granny.
"Drop the knitting!" shouted one of the officers. "And keep your hands were we can see them!" he added.
Granny released the needles, and the scarf fell into her lap with the yarn. The officer who had spoken reached out with the barrel of his gun and nudged the knitting from her lap onto the floor.
"Clear!" shouted another officer.
A young plainclothes officer carrying a digital clipboard entered the room, gingerly stepping over the wreck of the door. He gave the heap of knitting a scowl, and stopped in front of Granny. The riot police shifted aside to give him a clear view of her.
"Abigail Theresa Winslow?" the officer read from his clipboard.
Granny removed her reading glasses and looked up at the man. "Yes, that's my name." she said.
"You are hereby charged with Economic Terrorism in the 2nd Degree. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say is being recorded, and can be used against you in a court of law."
"I don't understand!" wailed Granny, wringing her hands.
The officer ducked down and picked up Granny's knitting. He held it up to the light, lifting it with only his thumb and forefinger, as if he did not like to touch it.
"This is a beautiful scarf, Mrs. Winslow." he said.
"Oh, thank you, but--" Granny began confusedly.
"I can tell you spent a lot of time on it." said the officer.
"Well, yes, I--"
"We have witnesses willing to attest that you sell these scarves for no more than the cost of the yarn..."
"Yes, I just enjoy making--"
"...Severely undercutting the prices of your commercial competitors by an order of magnitude, in spite of the fact that your scarves are obviously superior handcrafted products."
"I... I... well, ... Thank you?" said Granny, still confused, but recognizing the compliment to her handiwork.
"Don't get funny with me, Lady!" the officer snapped, leaning in close to Granny's face. "You should be ashamed of yourself! This sort of underpricing makes me sick! I've come to expect this kind of altruistic bull from hackers and teachers, but I never expected it from a respectable citizen with no criminal record. What is this world coming to?"
"Well, I never!" exclaimed Granny.
"Take her away, boys." said the officer.
Two of the riot police gently handcuffed Granny, and lead her out of the room.
"Send in forensics to bag the evidence." said the officer, dropping the knitting, and wiping his thumb and forefinger on his shirt. He looked around the room, and shook his head sadly. "When will people learn? She acted like she didn't even know it was wrong."
Not me personally you understand, but the company I work for. We were having a problem with a lot of our stock (especially seconds) turning up on ebay at sometimes less than 1/3 the SRP. We would also get lumbered with damaged returns that had found their way into the channel. Because our company knows most of the customers personally, we did some digging, whois.sc is your friend, then when the companies selling the cheap/returned goods came to order more stock, there was mysteriously no stock left for them. No stock, nothing to sell, at least non of our stock. However a lot of other people who were not selling too cheaply were just "cautioned" and "its ok as long as the prices are good"
I guess it depends on your organisation, some like ours are big enough to be the one of thebiggest manufacturers of this product but small enough to know every retail customer we deal with, and can therefore control the distribution channels quite effectively.
And before anyone moans that the market should dictate prices etc, bear this in mind. If one of your customers is worth over $60,000,000 a year, and they are working on small margins, retail sites and are getting undercut by some guy flogging stuff in the back of his van/ebay, how long till they turn round and stop selling your product, and therefore you potentially just lost $60 million.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
Is there a lawyer that might add some insight here on the concept of "first sale"? I was under the impression that after purchasing a product that you as the rightful owner of the product reserved the right to sell it any time and at any price.
load "$",8,1
.... if I purchase some products for which I later decide I no longer need and want to sell it so to reduce my losses from it and a company comes in an prevents me from selling such that they then are willing to pay the gigher price and buy it from me?
With all these bullshit patent, copyright, and now 'intellectual property' lawsuits pooping all over the place.. and the greedy lawyers earning their greedy reputations, I predict a new kind of legal letter...
It's called the 'Fuck Off Response.'
See.. it goes like this... Company A sends Person B a cease and decist letter. Person B sends a letter back saying, 'Fuck Off!'
This letter back symbolically represents the hours and hours of time consulting a licensed attorney, paying a licensed attorney tons of undeserved money at exhorbitant prices, that Person B is not afraid of large Company A, and that person B is willing to go through all the trouble to fight the original letter - without all the actual trouble.. just symbolically.
So, in other words.. a huge company with an army of lawyers may only choose to use what I have available to defend myself. If that is only myself and a public attorney, then said company may only use equal or lesser - or otherwise lose by default since company is not stooping low enough to reach me in order to even take a swing.
Little guy (or girl) says 'Fuck off.' (but en masse)
--- We need more Ron Paul!
It's owned by Corporations.
USA isn't a democracy. It's a giant auction. Your vote means nothing.
This could blow a hole in DRM too
You can't interfere in commerce like this.
Companies don't own their product after it's sold to someone.
After reading the comments thus far (about 30), many /. readers don't seem to get this story.
First, this is not about the buyer and the seller, this is about the company that makes the product and the person(s) selling the product new on eBay.
The case has already been to the Supreme Court, and "we" (aka the people) lost, the business have won. The test case was for a first (retail) sale, not an owner of the product trying to resell it. But that issue is being abused as well (again, what the article is trying to say).
Also incase you were wondering -- the decisions were split along party lines: Democratic and Republican representatives. The Republican representatives had the majority. (Yes, I know that the justices are not Democrats or Republicans, but the justices were appointed by them).
I don't understand how ITI is trying to sue Colon. Obviously Colon did not buy the products directly from ITI but bought them instead through a distributor. How did the distributor sell the products to Colon and make a profit, while at the same time still allowing him to resell them at less than what ITI says he is allowed to sell them for? It seems to me like ITI should be going after their distributor for breach of contract, not Colon. Or did I misread the article?
Fuck you I won't do what you tell me...
Fuck you I won't do what you tell me...
Fuck you I won't do what you tell me...
Honestly, I am getting so sick and fucking tired of these sort of controls. The perpetual infinite contracts where you have to cancel on the one day a year of renewal or you are hit with either an early termination fee or another term of contract.
It's getting ridiculous....
I've reached a point where I have no respect for copyright. 10 yrs ago things were different. But I'm sick of the price gouging and pseudo-controls. Why are all the stores charging $30 for a USB cable that used to cost $6.95. And that I can still go to Costco and get two + an extension cable for under $8. And they're gold-plated too boot.
The worst part of it, is people are so bloody apathetic these days that when there should be a revolt - there isn't. And so much money is dumped into welfare systems that enable people who don't work to buy HDTV's, cable, DSL, a Lexus, and what not without a care for where the money comes from. That hard working people can't even influence the system by not spending money. Cause we'll simply be taxed and have our money given to someone who will spend it.
*bah*
"Free Mars!!!"
The world has gone nuts.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When I first started using Ebay you could really get a bargain, and that's why I went there. However that was a long time ago. These days you're likely to see used goods sold at 80% or more of the original "brand new" product...sometimes they go for more than brand new which makes me wonder how legit these sales are. The other thing that makes me wonder is how I started getting second chance offers. What put the nail in the coffin for me buying stuff off Ebay though was my dissatisfaction at the handling of a dispute over a very low value item. (About US20). I got broken used goods where the claim was that the goods were "still in shrink wrap". Yeah re-shrinkwrapped. The proof I had to get to get my money back was certainly not worth the $20 and the seller started threatening me with legal action over factual comments I left on his feedback instead of dealing with the issues. So I issued a chargeback on my credit card, I closed my paypal account, and haven't used my Ebay account since. That was sometime last year.
Another time I was very lucky to get a much more expensive pair of items because the seller got the address wrong. Fortunately the goods got to me, but when I questioned the seller over whether the address was obtained from my Ebay account they just got defensive. I'd have been out US350 if those goods hadn't arrived. I've heard much worse horror stories from acquaintances at work but I'm not privy to the details and don't know how true they are.
Also fee increase over the years have made it not worth it to list low value items. So these items don't show up if you're a buyer and if you want to sell them you know you're better off trying to pawn them off to friends.
In short, Ebay isn't what it once was, at least for me. It was once an excellent place to get a bargain or get rid of unwanted goods.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Back before Al Gore invented the internet, I used to work in at a windsurfing store. The biggest competition started to be mail order warehouses that could sell boards cheaper due to less overhead. In the short term, its better for the consumer but in the long term, it kills the sport. People would go to the local store and find out which board they wanted then order it from the warehouse. Local stores couldn't compete and started to close up but these local stores were the ones were creating new customers through lessons, demos, etc. Some manufactures realized this and stop selling to warehouses.
I can understand why Merle Norman Cosmetics doesn't want their products sold on Ebay. If consumers don't buy the product in the stores, then why should the stores carry it. If stores don't carry it, how is the company to find new customers? Online, you can't sample a smell or see its true color. Cheap stuff is great but sometimes its affect on the bigger picture isn't.
Not exactly. Auctions that follow the Vickrey auction scenario are much closer to the "right" market price. Basically, everyone posts a secret bid, and the person who bids the highest wins, paying the price of the second highest bid. I've read numerous studies (too lazy to link to them) that conclude the Vickrey auction to set a much fairer and true price than traditional auctions.
I got nothin'
Parent has a fitting name.
We're all going to die. i intend to deserve it.
One of the comments on that blog brought up that the eBay seller might have been stealing the auction contents from the manufacturer's web site, i.e. images, product descriptions, etc. In that case, the legal action seems justified.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Here is a PDF of the ruling issued by SCOTUS. The essence is that "retail price maintenance" can have a procompetitive effect, in that it fosters interbrand competition while reducing intrabrand competition. For example, Bose Stereo competes with other brands, and sellers of Bose equipment know they won't be undersold by a different price-cutting franchise. This procompetitive effect was ruled to outweigh the dangers of anticompetitive price-fixing of the sort done by cartels and monopolies.
Both cases mentioned in TFA do point to likely collusion between the wholesale buyer and the auction reseller. It looks as if the wholesalers have indeed tried to circumvent their agreements to maintain fixed retail prices. Nothing to be alarmed about here.
These businesses hide behind the "free market" ideal until they can get away with twisting the market rules to their OWN ends... then, it's "necessary protection". Bah.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
What happened to the first sale rights?
The Supreme Court flushed 100 years of law down the toilet with a half assed decision that will create a flood of stupid litigation like the story details. It's half assed because the 5 strong majority made the ridiculous claim that SOMETIMES these kinds of agreement are AOK and can be enforced. The philosophical hypocrisy is obvious but the full shut down of internet competition is not to people who may never have bought something from ebay. The decider will be a court and that provides no justice at all in the fast paced world of the internet. How many months can any of you go with all your means of doing business shut down? Big business will use this to crush mom and pop retailers, so you can expect yet another round of vertical consolidation. There's no way the courts will be able to keep up with all of the complaints and only the larger retailers will be left.
McDisneySoftMart is very happy about this indeed. The malls will overflow again as people forget about online shopping. Welcome back to 1970, where the best deal in town are at Sears but now all the shit is made in China. Hey, you have to be authorized to sell stuff from China, don't you know?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's more complex than that.
E.g., what if it's a counterfeit product? It's damn easy to undercut someone's prices when you don't have to invest a cent in research (even if it's "what are people willing to wear this season") or even in marketing (since you're piggy-backing on someone else's brand image and using their own marketing investment against them.) Often you can cut more corners too, because, hey, if the product malfunctions spectacularly or even hurts someone, it's not _your_ brand image that goes down the drain.
Or what about stolen goods? Or defective goods which someone was supposed to dispose of, but made a bit of money on the side auctioning them? It's damn easy to undercut prices when you're selling stuff you got, essentially, for free by illegal means.
Or the case comes to mind which saddled us all with frequency- or multiplier-locked CPUs. A bunch of dishonest fucks figured out that they can take, say, a cheap 100 MHz CPU and overclock it to 133 MHz, make a computer with it, and sell it for quite a bit of profit. Remember that at the time most of the ID of a CPU was what was printed on it, and it was up to you to set the motherboard jumpers right. So, being that the CPU in a complete computer was under a heatsink, there wasn't even much way to see if you got defrauded without taking the computer apart, which Joe Average didn't usually do. But some went as far as to erase what was printed on the CPU and actually print the higher CPU frequency on it.
It was something which actively damaged Intel's reputation, and later AMD's when they were the last to sell unlocked CPUs. People were buying computers which kept crashing, or only worked as long as the temperature in your room was under 20C. Summer comes and your computer is a dysfunctional piece of shit. You'd maybe take it back to the shop and they'd tell you some "yeah, we've had a lot of problems with bad Intel CPUs lately." (When the only problem was that they had defrauded you of a lot of money.) There was a _lot_ of "Intel CPUs are shit and crash all the time" bad reputation built at the time. And later it was "AMD CPUs are shit and crash all the time."
Just, you know, in case you were wondering why CPUs are locked nowadays.
So basically it's trivial to have some auction where the whole point is that it's _not_ fair and open, you're not even buying what you think you're buying. And it might not be a price that a normal, honest seller would ever accept.
Plus, just because Slashdot has _yet_ _again_ a lopsided and inflammatory story, it doesn't mean you can jump to a conclusion based on it. There used to be a time when the stories actually had anything to do with technology, and it was exciting new stuff, not "version 2.5.1.2 of Product X released, people advised to patch their 2.5.1.1 version." Nowadays it seems that lopsided "company X is violating your rights if they don't buy me a pony" astroturfing is more common than anything even remotely related to computing.
So basically, if a story seems like a clear-cut "side X is 100% right, side Y is 100% wrong and are evil fucks to boot", that's usually your clue that you're spoon fed an astroturfing story. Reality is rarely that neat, and the devil often is in the details you're not getting, or are getting a cherry-picked slightly-warped version. If you can cherry-pick only the details you like, you'd be surprised how far reality can be warped. (E.g., think, "Hitler was buying roads and factories and the allies attacked him for it." If you conveniently omit such details as, you know, that three continents were plunged into all out war at the time and the ethnic cleansing part, the whole story takes a very different angle.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> The worst part of it, is people are so bloody apathetic these days that when there should be a revolt - there isn't. And so much
> money is dumped into welfare systems that enable people who don't work to buy HDTV's, cable, DSL, a Lexus, and what not without a
> care for where the money comes from. That hard working people can't even influence the system by not spending money. Cause we'll
> simply be taxed and have our money given to someone who will spend it.
I think you'll find that most people who get welfare aren't spending it on Lexus (Lexii?), HDTVs etc. If you're talking about the US, for example, official records suggest that more than 10% of the population can't afford enough food to support a healthy lifestyle.
You realize, don't you, that this gives big dumb companies the ability to shut down their competition? They enter into an exclusive deal with the Chinese factory and then forbid knock offs and all sales below retail price. They can set that retail price just below what you could sell the same thing using US labor, but drop it when required. All of the benefits of China's slave labor will then go to a small group of people. Their lawyers will be bigger than yours, so you will never see justice.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is how some houses are sold here in the UK too (including the one we bought). It is annoying as anything but ensures fairness and value for the seller in a short timeframe when the property is in demand and I think that they certainly do reflect fairly on the "right" market price as well.
Like Wargaming?
a day spa. She sells expensive creams. These creams can not be bought anywhere else in the county. (well, one or two other places) It's a day spa. They're not just selling creams, it's a whole package. You get a facial or a waxing or a massage or facial. You hang out for sometimes hours. You learn stuff. Then my friend sells you fancy creams that cost way more than average creams. Are they that much better? I don't know. But one of the reasons they sell is because you can't buy them anywhere else. (in town) My friend makes a significant mark-up on the creams. as she should, considering how much time and effort she has invested in marketing them. The salon and the cream company work together.
Now someone comes along and starts selling them on ebay. How did they get them? Used a salon account i imagine. This person can sell them for a tiny mark-up and still make a profit. That means people can go the salon, learn all about how awesome the cream is, and then go buy it on ebay for half the price. Where does that leave my friend? The cream company told her there was nothing could do to stop the ebay sales, they were working on it. (trying to eliminate the bad distributer) Now they can shut it down officially. And thats good for my friend, and the cream company. We are not talking about people being told they can't sell they're stuff. We are talking about nasty cut-throat business practices. (that should be illegal)
I'm an attorney, and a sometime economics professor. No, this isn't legal advice.
In short: big deal.
The new doctrine (which had been expected for years the next time this came up) applies to a very limited number of producers. It does *not* apply to those with market power.
Previously, the court had held that minimum pricing was always anticompetitive. The new ruling finds that *in itself* it is not *necessarily* anticompetitive. It could still be found to be so, however, based on the facts of the case.
A typical manufacturer will have no reason to try to hold up the prices of its product--it would rather sell more. For a very small set of them, however, the "exclusivity" or perceived quality is actually part of the appeal, and sales could go up.
If, for example, microsoft tried this, it *would* be anticompetitive, as they already had market power. On the other hand, if "Joe's Linux" were to insist that its CDs only be sold for a price of $199 or more, it would not harm the markets. If Chevrolet tried it, sales would plummet. BMW, on the other hand, might be able to make their vehicle more desirable this way--it would fit in with their current high-end service sales campaign. Furthermore, it can be used to insure that distributors *of an upscale product* have sufficient margins for the service level the company wishes to project--Nordstrom's instead of WalMart.
TFA gets it wrong, by the way, in indicating that this is about competitors stifling auctions. It's about manufacturers requiring their vendors to comply with their sales contracts. Assuming that the company is correct that she bought from a licensed dealer, she did this with knowledge of the contract terms. I doubt that it would be much of a stretch of privity to hold her to them in this case. The manufacturer could certainly take here deposition and find out the vendor, and then cut the supply that way. If she really bought them at a flea market, *that* vendor can be forced to reveal the dealer.
The manufacturer thinks that its product is more desirable if sold only through beauticians at high prices. Fine. There are any number of other manufacturers that are happy to sell.
hawk, phd, esq.
This is true, but it becomes an issue with overstock and discontinued items. You may sell at a loss just to get some of your money back, and brands want to prevent discounted products.
actually, it used to make a lot of sense.
There simply wasn't an exception to murder for killing yourself.
The *reason* it made sense is that felony meant that your life and lands were forfeit to the crown. Your life was already gone, but now your son didn't inherit. Typically, the son paid a year's income or some such to get the property back.
hawk
The basic problem is this...
Company A sells it's spiffy widgets for $100 each on the market.
Company A sells Widgets to reseller B for $50 each and tells them that they must sell it for at least $100
Reseller B sells Ebayer C the widgets for $60, thinking to themselves "well we sell him a lot and we make some profit so it's all good"
Reseller C sells the widgets to you and me for $70, we're happy at saving $30 over normal retail prices and he's happy to have his $10 for essentially brokering the transaction.
The problem is that the overall market value of the Widget has now been reduced to $70 and company A can't sell them for such big margins anymore because anyone with a web browser and google can find a better price.
The "legal fault" lies with the Reseller B who if they had charged the agreed upon price would not create the situation where Ebayer C could sell under market price and still make a profit. If theer were no resellers selling for less than the agreed upon price, the situation would never exist that an ebayer can sell them yet again and make any profit.
The "economic fault" lies with Company A for trying to artifically price fix an item at $100 when in fact it's not worth that much and there's plenty of room for everyone to make a profit and still charge less.
I hate where ebay has gone and the less gray market junk the better. I go there to get unusual things I can't get anywhere else. Why would I risk getting screwed on ebay if I can just buy something from a discount retailer? If gray market retailers get shut out it would eliminate many of the scummy dealers that run the place now.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
This story really surprises me. Here in down under, any attempts by a manufacturer to set a retail price are strictly illegal, and will bring the ACCC (Australian Corporation and Consumer Commission) down on one like a tonne of bricks. You see the result of this in advertising, and when prices are printed on goods: They are always labelled as "Recommended Retail Price", and everyone knows that the retailer is at liberty to charge any lower (or higher) price they desire. Any other arrangement seems strange to me. Am I alone there?
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
> But part of me wishes that the majority of consumers in the U.S. would shop based
> on the quality of products and services, not just the price.
There is a point when quality no longer matters because even the cheapest products are good enough. For example, I can go to the grocery store and have a choice of buying a brand name hunk of cheese for $6 or the store brand for $3. Since I can't tell the difference anyway, there is no reason for me to buy the more expensive product. Even when we look at products where durability matters, like, say, hard drives, the cheapest is usually good enough. All three hard drives in my machine were bought based entirely on price and are still running just fine after five, four, and three years. Sure, you say, just wait until one of them crashes. Yes, there is that risk, but considering that I keep regular backups, have no seriously critical data, and have never seen a hard drive crash, I consider the risk acceptable. I could go on, but it should be clear to anyone that the cheapest is usually good enough, and always buying "quality" in their stead is a waste of money.
OK, so I got this 100% wrong, apparently. And so are most other people on this page. :/
Yeah, see subject.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
Big fucking deal.
Let me preface the remainder by saying I'm not an economist or business person. I never had a business class, but I would expect that a company would not price its products wholesale below its manufacturing cost. Thus I would expect a margin (perhaps modest) built-in already.
In both of these cases, the manufacturer could simply jack up the wholesale price and simply say "here's the new price and oh by the way we did this because demand was increasing hint, hint, hint..." The contracted retail stores would think twice before selling products to wholesalers who are undercutting them and increasing their overhead costs.
I don't understand how an unwitting third party could be in violation of a contract they obviously didn't sign or possibly know about. And either way you slice it, these supposed manufacturers are still selling their product through their partners. If anything, its their partners that are at risk here.
"Uh. Rigging is the whole point of intellectual monopoly law. It's antithetical to free market capitalism. I don't know why you're surprised, america - you're about as capitalist as the soviets were communist."
People keep forgetting that the Internet routes around damage. There is no such thing as a monopoly when the whole operation can be moved to servers in another country. You're a seller in the US, and you want to sell to someone else in the US - just auction it off on ebay in the UK or Canada or france.
Kevin Smith on Prince
... but whats rediculous is the fact that these products were ALREADY PURCHASED. Therefore the company has already made its bucks off of its products ...
Actually, there may be a perfectly legitimate reason to prevent the sales. The products were purchased under a contract where the seller offers a lower price in consideration of an agreement to only sell at the Salon to end users. A reseller who buys from the Salon may be interfering with a contract, which is an area of the law where a third party rightfully becomes involved.
Does anyone know if there is, or is going to be, at list of fixed-price manufacturers that we can use to boycott them?
I couldn't find a list of the vote for this case... but the Kelo case was also on party lines.
And since I assume you're implying a corrupt Republican big business link here, I'll point out that basically Kelo allows Walmart to ask a city to take someone's home to build a new store, and it was the (rather socialist in this case) Liberal justices in the majority...
The short reply to this is: Doctrine of First Sale. I would argue that once a product is legally acquired, that the manufacturer cannot control what you do with it afterwards.
How long before the RIAA tries to take down used CD sales under this SCOTUS ruling? It's as bad as the eminent domain debacle of last year - and you can't blame just one political party for this pair of rulings.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm sure you must have noticed this, but since Alito and Roberts started in the Supreme Court, pretty much all cases that have pitted individual/public rights against corporate or government interests have gone against the individual/public. This court is a complete and shameless travesty of a sellout.
"Mark my words, pretty soon we will not be 'buying' anything, but will be 'licensing' lipstick and shampoo and hotdogs and underpants for 'personal use only', just like software."
Oh Bombula, no one will ever repossess YOUR underpants. Who would we hire to scrape the crust out?
---
Oh lord! My "word" for today is "bowels". Taco, you're a sick man.
You're wrong on this one. The democratic appointees (Breyer & Ginsburg) were on one side. The republican appointees (Souter, Stevens, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Thomas and Scalia) were split across both sides.
In any case, all the Supreme Court said is that retail price maintenance isn't "per se" illegal. That doesn't make it legal; it just means that courts are now going to have to figure out when it's legal and when it's illegal.
Neither of these cases is going to turn on what the Supreme Court said -- their lawyers are just adding it in hopes it bolsters their cases.
Do you really own something if you can't sell it? Kinda like a leased car.
The game.
"...But part of me wishes that the majority of consumers in the U.S. would shop based on the quality of products and services, not just the price."
That was a very arrogant comment. Think before you type such rubbish: A lot of consumers (if not most of them) shop based on price. Not everyone is able to choose merchandise based upon your personal view of 'quality'. Yes, I said 'your view', as you have NO idea what someone else's view of quality may be, yet you still made the stupid statement quoted above. How the fuck did that get modded insightful?
You sound like a typical, over-privileged American.
If she bought the stuff at a Salon, and resold it on eBay for a profit, then the salon must've sold it to her even cheaper.
The salon is the one violating a contract with the manufacturer, by selling the product at below the retail price demanded by the contract.
So, why dont they go after the salon?
Maybe they don't feel like doing the investigative work to figure out which salon is guilty, so they go after the unknown salon's cutomer instead.
Lazy ass lawyers.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
So if the economists argue a "free rider problem", what that suggests to me is that the solution is not anti-competitive agreements on fixed pricing, but rather we need "look and feel" shops that serve as a front to internet only ordering.
Picture it: you walk downtown or to the (disgusting) strip mall, and you enter a "shop" (in which you either pay a nominal fee [say $5 in 2007 dollars], or the store is subsidized by corporate sponsorship). The shop contains a dynamic and broad array of products waiting you to try out. Provided are free internet terminals, as well as pads of pen and paper. When you have "window shopped" you are encouraged to go home and order on the internet for the cheapest price.
Personally, I think a *lot* of consumers would go hog wild over an outlet like this: I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't already happened....
There are many retailers who do more than simply sell products to customers who come in asking for that specific product. They may have their own clientèle who will buy whatever they recommend, and they may have a huge advertising budget which they can use to push whatever product they feel like pushing. If a retailer is mailing out a million glossy catalogs 12 times a year and if you make that retailer happy, your product might be on the cover of that catalog, you have a pretty good incentive to make the retailer happy! If your product is available from someone on ebay for 30% less, the retailer would be less inclined to push your product and more inclined to find a product with less competition. The ultimate expression of the inverse relationship between competition and profitability is the "house brand" which is impossible to customers to comparison-shop, and therefore makes the most money for the retailer.
This leverage which large retailers can have against suppliers explains why manufacturers put up with all the hassles of dealing with WalMart: they may end up with a smaller profit margin on each unit sold, but in return they will get a huge market share and a high volume of sales, just because they are the brand that people happen to find when they walk in to WalMart.
Another good example is the musical instrument market, where Guitar Center/Musicians Friend is the 600-pound gorilla. Certain manufacturers make a guitar with a MAP of $200, and another, identical guitar in an "exclusive" color that only GC/MF gets to sell, with a slightly different model number, and a MAP of $190. Mom-and-pop stores can't get that "exclusive" color, and if they grumble about the same guitar being sold below their MAP, the manufacturer points to the fact that this one has a different model number and says "it's apples and oranges... this is a different product." This kind of leverage a large retailer can use against a vendor is, I think, what GP was referring to when he mentioned the willingness of his company to cater to the interests of a retailer with whom they do a lot of business each year. If making that retailer unhappy means losing the sales that come from having that retailer push your product instead of other competing products, you'll want to make that retailer happy even if it means making other, smaller retailers unhappy.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
eBay used to be neat. Now it is just a gaggle of businesses selling crap! The real value and "neat factor" of eBay was buying people's used stuff, person to person. eBay made a grave mistake by creating these stores and allowing businesses to use them. Personally I do not ebay anymore. They charge the seller to much and it doesn't protect the users ONLY itself. They don't care about manufacturers either. I used to ebay a lot; I'm also going to pressure my wife away from it as well. Too many rights violations; it is not wise to make a living from eBay. You could be shut down tomorrow for any reason with no other alternative. People need to quit being lazy and cheap and just build their own online presence.
I expect the neo-con's to swoop in any day now and stop this in the name of spreading the free market!
-Todd
Put down the sig, and step away from the computer.
For example Rotel doesn't allow its amps ot be sold online, or at discounted prices. If you do, they just won't sell any more to you. Doesn't affect used items, of course, but if you are a store and wish to be a Rotel distributor, you have to agree not to sell online and have to agree that the price is the price. I'm not sure for their reasoning behind this (most likely to try and maintain their "upscale" status) but it isn't as though they are sneaky about it.
"The buyer of the above product and transaction #, by acceptance of this receipt of purchase, agrees to the following Terms and Conditions of this Sales Licensing Contract:"
(insert EULA-type contract in the tinest print possible for a commercial retail printer to produce)
It would be trivial to impliment this at every point-of-sale in every major retail outlet. I can't believe the retail and manufacturing industries haven't started this already.
"What of the smaller retail outlets?"
Fear will keep them in line. Fear of corporate lawyers.
No penguins were harmed in the making of this post.
The official records would also show, if they bothered to measure such things, that a significant portion of that hungry 10% has a very large and expensive rent-to-own HDTV in their living room. Further, it should also show that they're feeding that television a rotation of cable and satellite providers under names of different household members: As one service disconnects due to nonpayment, another is subscribed to by a different person.
There may not be a Lexus in the drive, but there sure as fuck is an awesome set for watching wrestling on.
Kid-proof tablet..
But how do things like instant rebates, coupons, cash back, gift cards, etc... play into this? You technically aren't selling the product for less than the minimum price when you employ these types of offers are you?
Yea, this companies can't compete in a freemarket so they get thier lawyers to stop competitors.
FalconShould there be a Law?
everyone posts a secret bid, and the person who bids the highest wins, paying the price of the second highest bid. I've read numerous studies (too lazy to link to them) that conclude the Vickrey auction to set a much fairer and true price than traditional auctions.
In order to be fair the person bidding the highest should pay what they bid. If you can't pay full price then don't bid so high. Just like in gambling, which is what this is, you only gamble what you can afford to loose, or in the case of auctions you only bid what you can afford to pay.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I agree with the parent. A lot of stuff I buy just does not require a physical store and there is absolutely no advantage to buying it at one (except for instant gratification). For the vast majority of purchases, online shopping provides much more information about the product than some know-nothing salesperson who is only interested in making a sale. I want to read reviews of the product from the consumer's point of view. I want to comparison shop without wasting time and gas money. I want to post on forums and get more information from people who already bought the product. No store is going to let me sit down and browse the web in the store to do all this. Whenever I buy something in a store I get this icky feeling that I am probably paying too much. The cost of this online convenience is shipping (ignoring the fact that many online stores have free shipping). I would have paid this price anyway just by having to drive to the store. The only worthwhile stores are the ones that sell products that are too heavy/inconvenient/perishable/expensive to ship. I say, the hell with most stores. They are obsolete.
Thanks Hawk for setting those who argue their prejudices, straight. Slashdot needs it from time to time. Now if we could only make it a lasting experience.
That's preposterous. How would I be able to come in and snipe a good deal at the last minute if such a silly model was adopted?
It's fair in that the price is closer to the fair market price, not what a person is willing to pay for it. I'm not saying the system is perfect, because it is most certainly not.
I got nothin'
Lets say I have a salon. I have a contract with the cream makers, etc.
Now, I can't sell these creams on ebay, can I? - Breach of contract.
But my buddy Mike sure can! hell yeahh.. bling bling...
Try to find a manufacturer making a profit anywhere outside of China ... they only make a profit there by expoiting their workers
The Chinese workers aren't making as much as First World workers make, but they aren't being exploited. Sure the pay isn't as good but then again the cost of living is a lot lower too. Chinese who are employed in one of these factories make more than those who can't get a job at one, and if they can't get one it's because they aren't looking or trying hard enough to get work. Or they live in the wrong place. There is a real estate boom in China because workers there can afford to buy homes. And more and more are buying and driving cars. Heck, an American can move to China and live like a king by teaching ESL, English as a Second Language. This is because many, many Chinese want to learn English.
or despoiling the environment.
Pollution and despoiling the environment has been a problem however there is an active Chinese environmental movement in China and the Chinese authorities are becoming aware of just how important it is to cut down and stop pollution:
New rules to curb "rampant" violations of pollution laws
HEFEI, July 12 (Xinhua) -- China's environment chief on Thursday unveiled a set of tough new rules to tackle worsening lake pollution while lambasting the country's "bumpkin policies" that encouraged local officials to turn a blind eye to environmental hazards.
The regulations follow findings showing "rampant" violation of environment rules by almost nine in ten of the country's industrial parks and two fifths of companies.
Zhou Shengxian, director of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), said the new rules covering China's three major lake areas -- the eastern Taihu Lake, Chaohu Lake and the southwestern Dianchi Lake -- included:
-- A ban on all projects involving discharges containing ammonia and phosphorus, and the turning down of existing applications to establish such projects.
-- A ban on the production, use and sales of detergents containing phosphorous around the lake drainage areas.
-- The removal of all fish farms from the three lake areas by the end of 2008.
-- A ban on fishponds, vegetable and flower farms that may involve the use of fertilizers within one kilometer of the lakeside.
Zhou outlined the measures at a special meeting on lake pollution in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province.
In the last two months, blue-green algae outbreaks have been reported in the three lake areas, endangering domestic water supplies. On July 4, water supplies to 200,000 people in Shuyang County, Jiangsu Province, were halted for more than 40 hours after ammonia and nitrogen were found in a local river.
"Environmental problems, if improperly handled, can trigger major social crises, and improving water quality has become our most urgent task," Zhou told environment officials.
He said illegal activities that harmed the environment were "rampant".
SEPA investigations showed 87.3 percent of the 126 industrial parks in 11 provinces had violated environment rules, allowing environmentally harmful companies into their parks.
They also showed half of the 75 wastewater-processing factories failed to properly process water or were not operating at all. Of 529 companies that SEPA inspected, 44.2 percent were violating environment rules.
"Hazards are everywhere, and environmental accidents are very likely to happen," he said.
Some local officials often relied on companies for GDP contribution and their own promotions, and failed in their responsibil
Should there be a Law?
People don't seem to understand that this is a gross impact on the ownership of property.
Is this not clear? They're implying you cannot resell what you own and have bought w/o a contract.
Welcome to a world where you own nothing and rent everything. This is not "eBay Bargains Soon To be a Thing of the Past" but a "Anything you sell is controlled by the terms of someone else" You are being bound to a contract w/o ever having signed it. It's coming quicker than expected. I hope you can say to yourself that you never expected you would lose the right to own property.
"Who do you want to sue today" is not a sustainable business strategy in software, cosmetics, or for any other product or service. There's plenty if other makeup out there to be sold.
"beauty consultants" who are "specially trained in proper hygienic practices"???? wtf specially trained for what? My cat grooms itself with proper hygienic practices, and she never even went to college, no special training, not even trade school.
Look in the mirror and face the hard facts, if you're that ugly that you need a "specially trained" consultant to put overpriced make-up on you honey, just buy a 10 cent paper bag and call it a day, we still love you.
Hope is the currency of fools
Did you even read TFA?
The lady selling the cosmetics claims she bought them at a flea market. That would make the flea market purchase the first retail sale. She's just reselling her own property. Okay, so maybe she's lying and she actually bought them from one of the authorized resellers. But the company is not even bothering to dispute that. They're saying it doesn't matter if she bought the cosmetics from a flea market, and that they should have the right to enforce their minimum price on her regardless.
If they win, and that becomes precedent, you won't be able to resell that hammer from Home Depot online.
I think that one reason this is a problem is the typical example of going to Best Buy or Comp-USA to look at a product, but then going to Newegg to purchase. Newegg has much lower overhead, better selection, etc.
Previously I did the opposite, I'd use the web to do research then I'd buy from a brick and mortor store. If I buy from Newegg and need support I have to call then maybe have to have whatever shipped into a repair facility and wait. However when I've bought from Best Buy, when something was wrong I'd just take it down there to be repaired. I may have to wait a day or two but it's still a lot faster. I much prefer having someone I can see and talk to in person.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Comments here touch on the many issues that eBay has to deal with, including pressure from law enforcement regarding stolen goods, but the biggest recurring headache they have is the rights issue, and they invariably cave when they should and could refuse to play. They are a big public company with rich shareholders who care only about what the stock is doing. Individuals break the law (however it is interpreted) with respect to rights issues constantly, but don't get sued because nobody sues anybody (in business) unless they can conceivable get something at the end of the day. eBay, however, is a big target that is always squeezed by the lawyers, and is known for usually backing down and pulling auctions. The company is focused on building a mass market base in place of their original user base. There isn't really any meaningful voice or presense in any of this for individual users, who are, or were, the basis for eBay existence and massive growth in the first place. It has been this way for years now.
Now.. that said.. a salon trying to get out of their contractual obligations by selling on e-bay, fine, go after them, it's breach of contract... but you made your money when you sold the item the first time.. what happens after that isn't your problem.
There is no proof, only an allegation, a salon is breaking a contract. And it is the manufacturer's responsibility to find out what salon is breaking the contract, if it is being broken.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This is a case of eBay overreacting, rather than some new binding interpretation of Leegin vs. PSKS. The Supreme Court decision doesn't somehow support a magic transfer of contract liability to the consumer, and it doesn't negate doctrine of First Sale. The only legal power it conferred was the power for the manufacturer to enforce the MSRP contract with the wholesaler, if they had one. Once the cows are out of the barn, though, they're out.
As for the IP case, applying it to the resale of a manual and packaging material is ludicrous, but there's nothing that says they have to let you use their ad copy and photographs, or use their trademarks for anything other than a nominative purpose (i.e. this is my Wham-O Frisbee).
Used to be some time ago before there was an Open Solaris, you could download Solaris from Sun.
But... no tech support, no nothing. You're on your own.
And this is really sort of the reverse of that -- resale price maintenance.
The theory is that if you have a store that offers lots of customer service, gives you lots of information about the products, which creates more overhead, vs a store that has little customer service, gives no advice, has no information about the products, then customers will go the store with the customer service and product information, get their information, then go to the other store selling for cheaper there. It is in fact a true fact -- lack of resale price maintenance creates a free rider problem.
These resellers are "free-riding" on the customer service and advice given to their customers by the full-featured retail places.
Really, the question is how many substitutes there are for that product - amongst other things like anticompetitive effects - but if the product has lots of substitutes (and how many cosmetics brands are out there) then that company can do whatever it wants - vote with your dollars and don't buy their brand.
Many people feel this will actually stimulate competition - innovation, efficiency, etc. Instead of offering an inefficient manufacturer's goods at a discount, a competitor would start their own brand, perhaps handling customer service issues more efficiently, perhaps "toning down" the "consultations", or whatever - streamlining the whole deal, so that there aren't "official" retail outlets which are hugely inefficient and have to charge large markups which include the price of providing greater customer service, information, etc...
Some brands may feel it best to have some optimal amount of customer hand-holding be part of the product - it might make things more efficient - it might prevent unnecessary returns, it might help ensure greater customer satisfaction. If the customer doesn't like it, then they could buy a brand that doesn't hold their hand as much.
From another angle, you could argue, for instance - that people should be able to download a "free" version of Windows (perhaps without all the bells and whistles and IEs and Outlooks) of some sort, and install it, but the free version would offer no tech support, no nothing. If the customer couldn't figure it out, then they have to buy the real thing. Solaris was like this for quite some time.
OTOH -- Microsoft might be worried that this version of Windows would earn it a reputation that the software is difficult and doesn't work, so they may choose to only sell the product if there is hand-holding there, to ensure a smoother customer experience. The way things stand now, it's up to the brand - the manufacturer - this type of situation, provided there are substitutes and no significant anticompetitive effects, promotes "interbrand" competition (competition between brands). A "per se" vertical restraints rule, such as the OP is suggesting should exist ("per se" meaning that it's automatically illegal to tell the retailer how much to charge no matter what the situation) promotes "intrabrand" competition - competition "within" a particular brand, competition by retailers selling the SAME brand.
Now -- from the decision -- if I'm reading this right -- it said that the overruling of Dr. Miles is held and that vertical price restraints were to be judged by the rule of reason (i.e. how many substites for leather products, how many other companies, does this interfere with free trade, etc...). This is the way has been - RPM has been judged with the rule of reason. If they had reversed the overruling of Dr. Miles, then that would have been a change. Since the overruling is held, nothing has changed. The rule of reason is the "status quo", if SCOTUS had found that "per se" was the way to go, and that Dr. Miles should have been held, then a new "per se" rules would have been a precedent.
It WAS "rule of reason" before this case happened, so the
The thing I really don't understand here is that if these companies are selling their own product, don't they set the minimum price by virtue of what price they accept to sell their product to retailer/wholesellers? Unless we are talking counter-fit products, how can a official/legitimate product be sold for too little unless the product manufacturer (trademark holder) is selling it for too little in the first place? Even more so, if a product is going through at least one "middle-man" in the first place, before they end up online auctions, wouldn't that increase the final consumer price (be if online auction, online store, or even brick and mortar) granting that both the manufacturer and wholesaler/retailer are making some margin of profit?
Doesn't this all come down to supply and demand? Any given product will sell for what the market will bare (how ever much consumers are willing to pay). Doesn't it stand to reason that if a company complains they may go out of business because their product is being sold for too little, there is absolutely no one to blame but themselves?!?
Funny, most of the poor people I know are morbidly obese.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
So a company buys a product for x and can't sell it for x + $1, then tries to sell for $x or $x - $1 so it's not a 100% loss. They get sued. This discourages high-volume sales models. The more of any protected item you have, the more risk you have. It seems any contract with a minimum price should also have a date attached to that price. If I can't clear out at least 500 Gizmo 5000s in a month, ths is clearly a flop and you must buy these back for no less than 80% of what I payed for them, or the minimum price is dropped.
I wonder if this is in part pushed through to give a bit of negotiating power to some of the larger companies dealing with Wal-Mart or other large retailers who can usually dictate terms in a one-sided fashion. Will large retailers demand personal exemptions, or perhaps move to "renting" shelf space to suppliers. We're not buying the item from you, but we'll hold it in the store for you. If it sells we demand x% of the price, if it doesn't sell in a certain amount of time you have to claim it or we'll consider it abandoned trash and dispose of it as we see fit.
The recent ruling applies to new product sales only, folks.
;^)
/. these days?)
So don't panic. They can't do a thing about the used CD market because of the doctrine of first sale and similar law in the case of durable goods. Not without rewriting property law from scratch, which would, literally, require a revolution. There's too much precedent.
Carried to it's logical extreme, the article summary implies that the status quo established by this ruling even makes giving owned property away subject to legal action. I consider the tone to be somewhat hysterical. Rights to property transferral after purchase will be maintained by the SCOTUS, because that's how a private property system works in the first place. You have to maintain meaningful ownership.
The SCOTUS isn't about to throw capitalism in the trash can for some biazarro inverted socialist system where the workers are owned by the means of production! Sheesh.
Either that, or the RIAA is going to mobilize teams and start busting up garage sales. We'll see which happens.
These actions will hurt few, and mostly only stop a large number of shady auctioneers that are probably fencing stolen items (and likely doing other shady things like shill bidding up their auctions.) It's a good thing, folks. An unregulated mass-market is an unruly mass-market, and eBay has had this coming for years.
--
Toro
(In other news, does it seem like there's a lot more FUD on
Most people on ebay do buy at a higher price and sell at a lower one. It's called "sell off your old crap cuz it's taking up too much space." Do you sell items at a garage sale higher than the purchase price?
My sister used to sell on eBay. She'd go to garage, yard, sales then sell on eBay more than she paid. She also visited antique and secondhand stores and made deals with them to sale on eBay, she'd then keep a cut of the sale price. After watching her, her son started doing the same.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Newegg's policy is actually pretty darn good. They assume that you know what you're talking about when you say it's broken. So you fill out a web form, they ship you a new product and you need to ship them the broken one within a few days. You get refunded once they test that you were right about it being broken. No waiting in phone queues, no standing in line, no driving to the store. It's really pretty nice for someone who knows enough to be able to make that "is it broken" judgement call themselves.
Uhm, I didn't know that. If it's your computer though, and you only have one, then you need to somehow get access to another. When I need, or want, new parts and such I may check them out. Actually I do, I want to get a dl dvd drive for my Linux box. Or maybe a BlueRay or HD DVD drive. As I want it to make backups, the larger the capacity the better, I have almost 200 GB of data on my hdds now.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So you don't have any data, you just have a "gut feeling" that poor people are buying HDTV? Would it have anything to do with the government forcing everyone to buy HDTVs?
You think that every town that sells a product can support a repair center to fix it????
It wasn't so much that I had to ship it in for repairs but that I had to pay to ship it even though it was under warranty. What burns me even more was that the monitor I sent in wasn't fixed. When I got it back and plugged in it had the same problem. It was usable for "normal" stuff, but it didn't display colour correctly and it was a 21" Nokia. After seeing it had the same problem I unplugged it and stuck it in a closet.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Two very well known economists that study auctions and mechanism design would disagree about the Vickrey auction being the best. In fact, when used in iterative or combinatorial situations, the Vickrey auction can be downright bad.s /Lovely%20but%20Lonely%20Vickrey%20Auction-072404a .pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/~milgrom/publishedarticle
Maybe making suicide illegal somehow helps survivors such as insurance companies and creditors.
I don't know about all life insurance policies but some have clauses that if you kill yourself in the first X number of years the policy is forefitted, ie won't be paid. Creditors though have an interest in making sure the insurance was paid, so they can be paid.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So why not just bid more than you're actually willing to pay in the hopes that the 2nd highest bid was more reasonable?
But then what if everyone bids high so they win, thinking they'll pay a much lower second price? Not allowing a bidding war will also mean a reduced price for the seller. People who are wanting to buy but don't know the market price or value of the product will not be able to bid. A secret ballot means you don't know you're out of the bidding until it's too late to find another auction, so all the losers in the auction are severely inconvenienced.
No, I'm afraid this Vickrey method is full of flaws.
Do the words "bread and circuses" mean anything to you?
You better keep the proles fucking amused, otherwise things tend to get set on fire. I can't believe you have an issue with them owning good tvs. It's keeping them from stealing your car or getting shot from being outside in the ghetto they live in. Naturally they cannot afford health care, so when they go to the hospital with a gun shot wound or whatever guess who is paying for that?
It's really a very simple concept. The less you own, the less you have to lose.
Let them have TVs, cable, internet whatever.
I'm not familiar with the method, but according to your explanation of it, it would result in insanely high prices.
I'd bid 10 million bucks for pair of shoes. Why not, I know I'll never have to pay it.
Problem is, everybody would bid that way!
You complete misunderstand Vickrey's work - so your erroneous conclusion is understandable. Do a tiny amount of research and you'll realize it's way over your head.
Because the other guy will do the same.
In case the second highest bidder does the same.
But then what if everyone bids high so they win, thinking they'll pay a much lower second price?
In that case, the buyers are morons. Seriously, if you can't understand that someone might try to do the same thing as you do, you really are stupid.
Not allowing a bidding war will also mean a reduced price for the seller.
So your first point claims people will pay too much, the second claims people will pay too little. Bidding wars do not necessarily raise prices across the board. Some people start a bidding war, then drop out assuming the opposition is too determined. With blind bids, people will bid the amount they are willing to pay.
People who are wanting to buy but don't know the market price or value of the product will not be able to bid.
Come on - if you don't know the rough market value of an item, you shouldn't be bidding on it at all. Anyway, this system protects people who wildly overbid to some degree - you only pay the second highest bid.
A secret ballot means you don't know you're out of the bidding until it's too late to find another auction, so all the losers in the auction are severely inconvenienced.
I think this is the only really valid point here. However, it's not all that important depending on the auction. Many different timeframes can be used with this style of auction.
No, I'm afraid this Vickrey method is full of flaws.
I'm so glad we've got you to point them all out. You've convinced me....
...that isn't a total prick piece of shit?
Stop fucking with the lives of people not doing anythign wrong. How can reselling something you bought be wrong? What sort of diseased mind go to law school?
I swear, everytime I read some legal argument, I feel like its a dispatch from a demented parallel universe. Those fuking asshats are going to eventually bring down civilization.
Motherfucking cocksucking pig shit lawyers.
Och, they do things strangely in Scotland
this ruling was broken from the start- it basically is saying to smaller retailers that the only way to compete with a large reseller is to be able to negotiate larger contracts- in other words in order to compete with a large reseller as a small reseller you have to be a large reseller. this goes against every concept of competition free markets and- well, the american dream as well.
logistically when it comes down to it how do you expect a small reseller to be able to compete with the customer service and replacement as well as shipping and packaging departments of a larger company/corporation if it can't give a price break? I normally purchase from smaller resellers when I buy things for 2 reasons
1. I feel better about giving the $ to an independent reseller
2. you can usually find products 10-30% cheaper from a small reseller if you search around
in the end, if they take away #2 it is hard to justify #1- especially if the price goes up
I just read about 200 comments on this story. Not a single libertarian saying that "Free market Capitolism" will fix any problem. Where are you guys when we need you? This is the storybook case for freedom from government interference and letting the free marketplace do its magic work!
I really expected an uproar from the Libertarians about this but they are strangely silent. Maybe they don't really believe what they say about things they are against and actually support the monoply/oligopoly form of capitalism we have now with government controls of free trade. I am really dissapointed with the non-response from the Libertarians. They must be "only if it benifits me" hypocrites!
using a different ebay doesn't work... stuff gets taken down on those for the same reasons. A friend on mine has had to give up selling his replica Fender Bass guitar as every time he lists it, it gets taken down. He's not mis-selling it, he actually describes exactly what it is, a Replica Fender Bass made from Warmoth parts... he believes the problem is Fender has people policing ebay looking for what they consider trademark abuse... and he's falling foul of them as he's got a genuine Fender logo on the headstock...
the annoying thing is that they aren't going after the real fakes... the ones that people are actually misrepresenting as actual vintage Fenders.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
They can place the serial number on the packaging in such a way that it cannot be removed without making the product look damaged. A lot of customers would complain and refuse to buy products with packaging that appeared damaged.
This is awesome, truly we are living in a age of golden prosperity.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
That would be good evidence that the system doesn't work - the house price market in the UK is way out of whack with the prices increasing at many times the inflation rate (round here you can't buy a house unless you're some kind of stock broker or diamond thief - and the price keeps going up. We're far from the most expensive as well).
With a public auction you'd keep the price down and have to compete.
However. Different brands have different reputations. Ferraris, Ducatis have the reputation for being red, very fast and with temperamental reliability. In terms of quality, these are the things that define high quality, where the "very fast" is far more important to the buyer than the temperamental reliability.
If you want reliability, buy a Honda. They have a reputation for sacrificing "very fast" in favour of reliable. A quality Honda is a reliable machine that will "just work". A quality Ferrari is a machine which will take you 0-60 in 4 seconds flat, go round corners like it's on rails and wear through a set of tyres in less than 10,000 miles. Problem is it takes education, LOTS of education to buy smart and for quality. Education is not what the consumer wants to hear, they want to buy their new "ooh shiney!" right now. Actually the problem is inappropriate quality information, not education. Person A is a gamer, for them the video FPS value is absolutely crucial. Person B wants a new computer to write letters to his maiden aunt. He asks person A for help because they "know computers". Person A looks through the market and picks the fastest machine on the market, big heatsinks, liquid cooling, 21" monitor and it costs a fortune. The different measures of needs, qualities and assumptions lead to inappropriate purchases.
Of course, salespeople, marketing and advertising exists to muddy the waters further, if everyone found it easy to find the qualities they want then they wouldn't overspend.
There's a second force in play. The need to show off. And it is a basic human desire though I have no particular sympathy for people who overspend inappropriately in order to show off. Basically, look at me, I can afford a Ferrari. Look at me I can afford a Sony. People who do so are attempting to advertise to the opposite sex that they have the requisite resources to bring up offspring.
Deleted
In that case, the buyers are morons. Seriously, if you can't understand that someone might try to do the same thing as you do, you really are stupid.
Buyers *are* morons. Which means that it'll happen - and happen a lot.
Great for the seller.. they'll get to sell something at way above what it's worth. Sucks for the genuine buyers who'll be outpriced by the morons.
You called it.
The Free Market totally works. People with the best ideas and the best implementation WIN WIN WIN in a Free Market! The Free Market Decides it so!
Heck, it allowed the ruling elite to compete their way to the top and hold onto everything forever. They got there by the sweat of their brows and the shrewdness of their schemes! (Then by the sweat of their slaves and the governments they own). The Free Market gave them the freedom to win! Rah Rah! --Too bad the Free Market isn't like a board game which gets reset every time you put it back in the box.
In effect, we've been playing the same game of Monopoly for over 3000 years. --Longer if some conspiracy theorists are correct.
And you know how it goes. When your little brother has hotels on all the good properties, all the money ends up in his hands and you have to mortgage yourself to kingdom come just to stay viable until pay day while the little devil squeaks at you with infuriating glee.
The Rothschildes and their brethren must be a gleeful people.
-FL
The UK housing market is in a really bizarre state, but I don't think its to do with auctions, since these types of transactions only represent a small percentage. I think its more to do with panicking about being left behind when everyone else is buying...
So I bid 1 million dollars to be sure to get that precious Nintendo game I could not find anywhere... another, not so daring bidder, says hundred thousand dollars, he thinks no one is going to be so stupid to bet that much... I am the stupid one and I end up paying hundred thousand dollars... yeah, this must be really close to the market price.
Let me guess: the interest rates are very low in the UK right now?
Here in Sweden, real estate prices are also ridiculously inflated. This is very clearly linked to the low interest rates. People bid more on houses than they should be worth, just because they can borrow large amounts of money very cheaply from the banks.
If the economy changes and interest rates go up, a lot of people will find they can no longer afford the payments. And as the interest rates go up, house prices will go down, so they will be forced to sell their houses at a huge loss.
It's not the first time this happens, and it will not be the last.
If a mall is popular and you stop retailers in the mall from stocking your products, you are the loser. Not the mall. There are ten other manufacturers who will supply the mall's customers. Unless your product is so great that customers cannot do without it. Or you have patented it that others cannot copy its functions/features.
Sriram
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
As usual, stuff gets blown all out of proportion here on Slashdot (don't get me wrong -- I love this place and visit it often, but y'all do have a habit of treating everything in a rather "chicken little" fashion).
I don't think this will ultimately affect most "little guy" sellers out there. Most companies don't care much what you do with an item once it's purchased from them -- they got their money, transaction over, they are concerned with selling more of them to more victims...errr...consumers. If you buy a widget from Company A, then decide you don't need it after all, and turn around and sell it cheaper to a friend, or through a newspaper ad, or at a garage sale, or on eBay, that's not a problem. Now, I can see the company being concerned if they sell in quantity at wholesale to a distributor who then undercuts them on the retail price he offers to others, but that's another ball o'wax.
The two examples given are not necessarily typical. To focus on one, Merle Norman....in a similar vein, I once knew someone who sold Mary Kay, and they are incredibly strict about how their products are perceived by the public -- they want to insure that their distribtors present a certain image, that the products are marketed and presented in a certain fashion, etc. So it may well be less about selling price and more about image. They have tried for many years prior to Leegin to prevent just any old yahoo from reselling their war paint because they may not properly represent the Mark Kay "mystique" -- this just gives them another takedown tool. I'm certain Merle Norman is probably simalarly anal about their products. Mass mega-companies like Revlon or Maybelline don't care if you bought a few tubes of Midnight Ebony mascara, used one a few times and decided it's not your color, then list the other unopened tubes on eBay to get rid of them.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Congrats on proving that you're too fucking stupid to read even the first paragraph before jumping to write that standard zealot answer. No, really, it's something to be proud of. Even die-hard ADHD cases usuall run out of attention span only after at least 2 paragraphs.
Exactly which part of "counterfeit" confuses you? No, seriously. Exactly in which form or shape does selling _counterfeit_ goods mean company A got their money for it? Here's some free clue: if you buy counterfeit or stolen Gilette blades, Gilette doesn't get a cent out of that. That's the whole point of counterfeiting.
And goods which were bought at some flea market, just she doesn't remember which? Oh please. If that doesn't sound like a standard counterfeit goods excuse, I don't know what does.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Buyers *are* morons. Which means that it'll happen - and happen a lot.
Not really. If they make outlandish bids and wind up having to pay a lot too many times, they'll run out of spare cash to buy junk at auction.
There should be some limit to the price buyers are willing to bid anyways; I.E. the cost of buying the item brand new directly from a local retailer or on other public web sites, that aren't in auction format.
Presumably a buyer never wants to bid so much that they could get a worse deal on the auction than on buying from the other readily available source.
sigs are hazardous to your health
All you'd have to do is bid 99 billion dollars, and you'd automatically win any auction, only paying a tiny fraction of your bid. That doesn't sound particularly fair to me.
stuff |
Just like has been done with that big Russian MP3 seller did I suppose ?
The unlawfullness of that company is not even *prooven* (it has not even passed a court-of-law), but it has been made, by the combined forces of a few monopolists (by banks, RIAA's parents, and in the end "Benevolend father" America) un-accessible without *any* kind of due process.
If the sole point was to win auctions, then this "bid $99 Billion" strategy would be a winner. I would very much like to know that you are using this strategy to win auctions where I am selling goods.
Most people care about buying things at a price that is less than what the thing is worth to them. It would be stupid to pay more for things than they are worth.
The "secret bid" auction works because a person bids exactly what the item is worth to the bidder. The bidder is guarenteed to either get the item for less than the bid (which is a win for the buyer), or not get the item because someone else wanted it more (which is a win for the seller).
Here's an example: I was at an auction earlier in the spring. One of the items in the auction was a nice load of lumber. Me (and two friends; it was a big load) got together, and decided on the maximum we were willing to pay for the lumber: $375. I could have gone to a retail lumber store and gotten a very similar load of lumber for $450 to $500. Which strategy would work better, bidding $375 or bidding $99,000,000,000?
It depends on whether "winning" the auction was more important to me than saving money. Someone else actually bid $575. I would not feel like a winner paying $575 for that load of lumber.
I'd agree with Fender in this example. Basically what your friend has is a Fender counterfeit which he's trying to sell as a counterfeit. Take off the Fender badge and it's no longer a counterfeit. Hell, sell the guitar WITH the unattached badge and a tube of glue if needs be.
You may want to rethink that strategy. There might be other people out there like you that decide 99 million is absurd enough to beat everyone else.
Hrm,
I wonder if this means there will be more garage sales like there used to be pre-eBay? I wonder, if that were to happen, if it means lawyers will be trolling said garage sales.
Anyone else sick of this litigious society in which we live?
Individual morons will run out of spare cash, but the universe will never run out of spare morons.
Redundancy is good And also good.
We have a right to trial by jury in cases whose stake is > $20. Educate them that they have the final say on the justness of a law. Even if a law says 'X,' if they think 'X' is unjust, they can say he who committed 'not X' does not owe money.
If all commerce worked as you describe, the result would be that every purchase takes place at the highest price a buyer is willing to pay. Why should it be that way? There is the highest price a buyer is willing to pay, and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept. Why shouldn't the "fair market price" be somewhere in between those two values? After all, the seller is essentially gambling on the price they'll receive -- if they can't afford to accept anything less a given price, they should clearly state that minimum acceptable price before bidding begins.
In other words, what you seem to dislike about that system GP described is not that that the bidder can't pay "full price", or that they will bid more than they can afford (or are willing) to pay (because there is no reason to think either of those is true), it's that the system doesn't totally favor the seller as much as possible (within the realm of not cheating the buyer, admittedly) -- it favors some degree of compromise between the buyer and the seller.
Imagine there is someone standing on a street corner trying to sell a desirable item to anyone who will buy it (it can be a car, if you want a car analogy). People start informally bidding for it. One very observant person is willing to pay $100 for the item, but merely watches the bidding for a while without speaking up. The bids seem to slow as the value approaches $70. Finally, one person says "$75! That's the most I'll give you." The seller looks around, hoping someone will bid higher, but everyone else starts to clear from where they have gathered. The observant person walks up and says "I'll give you $76." Assuming the person who bid $75 wasn't bluffing, and doesn't get emotional about the loss, the observant person will win the auction for approximately the second highest bid.
Is this unfair? Should the observant person have offered $100 simply because they would have been willing to pay that much? If the seller had an obvious financial hardship, and were making a sacrifice to get quickly needed money, someone might offer to pay more than they have to out of altruism -- but we're not talking about charity. Is it not fair for the person willing to bid the highest to end up paying the second-highest bid, on the grounds that the seller cannot get a substantially higher bid through competition between buyers?
I'm sorry, but if your business model depends on making customers do things that they don't want to do, things that are easily bypassed in favor of heavy discounts, you're just asking to go out of business.
The examples you've cited are very weird and somewhat debatable. The long and short of it is that price fixing is bad for the general public, and if businesses choose to engage in the practice by exploiting legal loopholes and piss off their consumers, they don't deserve to be in business. There shouldn't be any kind of legal protection for this type of activity, period, and the Leegin v. PSKS decision will eventually be viewed historically as one of the Supreme Court's spectacular mistakes.
"official records suggest that more than 10% of the population can't afford enough food to support a healthy lifestyle."
/= "can't afford enough".
Er, "choose not to buy"
None of my "poor" friends have the slightest idea about healthy lifestyles nor do they care.
I realize the plural of anecdote is not data, but stand in line ay your local grocery store and note who buys what. The US has plenty of obese "poor" because of the choices they make and the things they refuse to learn.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I don't know where you have been, but 'some Russian mp3 site' is still accessible, if you know how.
This is the point of the internet now - open access to the properly informed.
Forget the limit. If people aren't willing to spend the time to actually research the actual retail price of a product(which should never take more then a few minutes of googling), then they deserve to lose out. Really, if you can't bother to make yourself an informed buyer, then why should you expect to not waste money, let alone save it, as is intended by many online auction-goers.
Please...it is lose. You can lose a shoe and never find it again.
A shoestring can become loose, and you need to tie it again.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Besides, you may have the means to get the goods, but your means to *pay* for it are still in control of the banks who, without any due process, deny you to do with your money what you want.
How come you think you(/we !) are not still under their control, and thus not really able to get "the RIGHT price" ?
If the bidders are aware of the procedure, and thus understand the risk of bidding too high, well, they won't bid too high.
[
You know, I clicked the link in your sig genuinely considering a host switch (after some research of course) but when it started playing some audio intro in my background tab that got immediately closed.
I'm not sure if you're actually with the company or just put up a referral link, but if you have any say in getting that silly thing removed I say do it. No one wants their browser to just start talking, particularly from a background window. It happens enough with ads already (I think, thanks to Adblock I haven't seen a banner ad in years).
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
An auction price will typically be higher than the average demanded (strictly competitive) price because the winner values it higher than society does -- therefore, the winner is always a loser in an auction as he would've gotten the same good at a lower price in a market. The only case in which an auction is a true price is for a unique or extremely limited item, because that items social benefit is the highest value placed upon it - an item that can be perfectly distributed for maximum social benefit. Of course, all of the social benefit goes to the seller because the buyer has paid all (or most of) his benefit to the seller for the item.
Auctions benefit the sellers. It's the winner's curse.
These items seem to be directly sold on E-Bay (Buy It Now!) as opposed to auctions. Which would mean that these prices are the price of the good + profit for seller. The retail stores charge price of good + price of service + profit, so naturally, the online prices will be lower.
If one takes this behavior to its logical conclusion then it will become illegal to give gifts (essentially selling something for $0). Happy Birthday Timmy! Now give me $3 and you can have a slice of cake.
Don Imus said some bad things. He went off the air. People but him off at the source, the money. They targeted his sponsors.
These companies will get away with this crapped mistreatment of people who are seeming well within their common sense rights. I'm a simple man who understands that when I purchase a part for my car that I own it. Sometimes I get the wrong part and I sell it, maybe at a loss. I just don't need the clutter. In this case we see someone who has discovered a pricing advantage and a company with a flawed view of the world. They could have struck a deal with this guy, maybe even offered him a job. They could have fixed their screwup, but like complete morons drunk on the owners money, they have launch a PR salvo to let the world know they're assholes. Good job!
Hey, when I purchase something I own it. I'll do as I please with it. I know why my rights are restricted, I'll have signed an agreement. This quantum control method seems about as effective as the war in Iraq. Not very. These companies can either find the way to profit from this situation or act like my 3 year old when he does not get his way. Actually my son is more mature about such things. When he hands me a Thomas train he does not invoke the DCMA when I pass it off to my other son. It he was a company he'd be a rare item.
But then there is the public. They don't go to the best companies. Companies with a spine and a moral center. Yes, I said m-o-r-a-l. And I'm thinking "character", which might be more rare. Look at Snapper Mowers. Or the way Sears was with it Craftsman tools. Just because the company will always do right does not mean you will buy from them. And even if they are evil like Amazon and it's 1-Click, I bet you still use them. Companies are only assholes when you want to reward asshole-ish-ness with money. Money might be the only vote you get in this life. Over your lifetime you are going to have millions of dollars pass through your hands. The biggest change you can make to the globe will be how you spend it. Intelligently, stupidly, good, or evil, it's all up to you. And if you only base your buying on price, then you have picked evil above all else.
Good luck, and be aware that we out number the people who would invoke the DCMA for such stupid reasons. So, do something, or just sit there.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Maybe these folks should sell the items at $1M each, with an "instant rebate" of $999,995
Seriously though, has it come to the point that a manufacturer can end someone's livelyhood on the mere suggestion that they "sold stuff below the price I want my stuff sold at"
It would seem so judging by the cases mentioned.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
* The auction is not budget balanced. It does not maximize the seller revenues; the seller revenues may even be zero in VCG auctions. If the purpose of holding the auction is to maximize profit for the seller, as is often the case, the Vickrey auction is a poor choice.
* It does not allow for Price discovery, that is, discovery of the market price if the buyers are unsure of their own valuations, without sequential auctions.
* Sellers may use shill bids to increase profit.
* In iterated Vickrey auctions, the strategy of revealing true valuations is no longer dominant.
The Vickrey-Clark-Groves mechanism has the additional shortcomings:
* It is vulnerable to collusion by losing bidders.
* It is vulnerable to shill bidding with respect to the buyers.
* The seller's revenues are non-monotonic with regard to the sets of bidders and offers.
70% of statistics are made up.
It doesn't mean they are, either.
First, let me say that yes, I believe you, and am willing to accept your numbers, at least for the sake of argument. There are Chinese workers being exploited, and there are American companies who have no problem doing so. This is horrible and shameful and has to stop.
However, that doesn't mean that all Chinese labour is necessarily exploitive. There are many places where exactly what falconwolf speaks of is happening. As a matter of fact, my wife will be visiting the Chinese factory that the company she works for owns/runs early next month. She's been there several times already, and it's pretty darn nice: new, spacious, clean, good working conditions, well air-conditioned. Not a sweatshop.
Just because some Chinese workers are being exploited doesn't mean that the whole idea of it is wrong. Yes, they need better worker protection laws—in fact, they need a lot of better protection laws on all sides. But so far as I can tell, they really are working on it, and in the meantime, most Chinese companies who do business with US companies seem to be doing their best to keep their noses clean.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Y'know, I think the problem you and your debating partner are having here is you're neglecting the middle ground. You appear to be positing that either one can make $billions in profit, or one can make $0 in profit, with no other possibilities.
I think that you and I both know that's not true, which suggests that the problem is simply in the terminology.
Am I correct in my belief that what you really mean by "you can't make a profit in a competitive market" is "you can't make a big profit in a competitive market"?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Actually, they are having a big problem in rural china whith people being kidnapped and forced to work in factories against their will for nothing or almost nothing. There are a few people that are escaping from these rural factories after a year or years and are telling the story to the media. The government has little way of knowing how widespread this practice is. Anything to make a buck..
I have a "gut feeling" consisting of the two poorest families that I know having both cable television and HDTVs.
This is not due to government mandate, but is instead just blatantly excessive: The TVs in question are fucking huge.
Kid-proof tablet..
This might just start the revolution. America divided we stand.
Can't all instructions be written down on 1 page ?????????????????
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
What scares me even more than the price issue companies are complaining about, is that the article talks about an ebay seller getting sued because they took pictures of what they were selling, and the company claimed copyright on those pictures.
How long will it be until people can't post pictures on websites, because someone's wearing brand-X tshirt, or maybe there's something in the background that will be copyrighted. Ugh.
Why not? With your silly bid, you'd get the goods, and you'd pay the amount of the highest sensible bid. Sounds fair to me.
Unless of course somebody else had the same idea, but only bid one billion dollars. Then you're fucked.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
A quick google turns up 1.1 million links for the phrase "chinese exploited workers"
Ah, I see the first link is to Canada Tibet Committee. I agree Tibetans are being exploited and persecuted by the Chinese. Because Tibetans aren't Chinese. The sovereign nation of Tibet was invaded and conquered by Mao's army in 1959. Free Tibet!. Now change "Chinese" to "United States" and the number of results increases from 1,160,000 to 1,770,000, an increase of more than 500,000. Does that mean there are more workers exploited in the US?
Go take a gander at Frontline's Is Wal-Mart good for America video
Walmart doesn't just buy from China to sale in the US, Walmart also has stores in China. In the not too distant future China will be Walmart's biggest market. It is partnering or buying Chinese retailers, Wal-Mart plots bid for Chinese retail giant. Chinese employees of Walmart are even unionizing.
Chinese who are employed in one of these factories make more than those who can't get a job at one
That doesn't mean they aren't being exploited. Work & safety conditions play a large part. Ask a coal miner.
You're right it doesn't mean they aren't being exploited, but if they are fighting to get those jobs I'd say they are very willing work and accept the work conditions, thus they aren't being exploited.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If all commerce worked as you describe, the result would be that every purchase takes place at the highest price a buyer is willing to pay. Why should it be that way? There is the highest price a buyer is willing to pay, and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept. Why shouldn't the "fair market price" be somewhere in between those two values?
Not all commerce is an auction. At auctions only 1 or a small number of items are put on sale. Each item may be owned by a different person, who wants to get the best price they can. For large quantities of items a fixed retail store is more effiecent. The owner, seller, makes money by selling in quantity at 1 marked price. It would be expensive and tyme consuming for each item to be auctioned.
Is it not fair for the person willing to bid the highest to end up paying the second-highest bid, on the grounds that the seller cannot get a substantially higher bid through competition between buyers?
Generally no, whatever a person is willing to bid is what they should pay if they bid the highest. Don't bid higher than you're willing to pay!
FalconShould there be a Law?
Because you're not willing to pay that much.
If you have the highest bid and the 2nd highest bid is less than you're willing to pay, you'll pay the amount of the 2nd highest no matter how far above it you bid. In this case you might as well have just bid what you were willing to pay.
If you have the highest bid and the 2nd highest bid is more than you're willing to pay, you're stuck paying more than what you were willing to give - a bad result.
The only conceivable reason to bid more than you're willing to pay is to try to screw someone else.
I'm rather frustrated that I didn't see this when it was first posted, but I'll and my 2 cents anyway...
...I run a deals website where my goal is to optimize value (think product-quality to price ratio) for the consumer. Needless to say I've an eye for recognizing a deal as a result and I feel VERY confident in saying that eBay hasn't had 'deals' in a very long time. By the time the last bid has been placed and shipping costs have been factored in, you're almost always paying close to MSRP or market value (whichever happens to be less at the time). People really are best off using resources like Pricegrabber, Pricewatch and Google Products. The only exceptions to this that I've encountered to date are items not readily available in the US (e.g. my fiancée bought me a nice Japanese style lunchbox recently), products no longer in production, and collectables.
If one of your resellers is breaking the contract they made with you, you have every right to and should seek recourse against them.
That is not what is happening in these two cases.
You don't have a right to go after people that you have not made a contract with.
I buy a hammer, use it, then give it to someone as a gift - and go to jail because my "gift" prevents you from selling another hammer.
This is the ultimate logic of the concept of "intellectual property" - wherein it is revealed that the purpose of IP is the control of everybody else, not the improvement of the species by "stimulating invention".
The bottom line: human chimpanzees simply CANNOT allow anyone else freedom of action because they believe it threatens their existence.
This is what you get when you couple conceptual processing and imagination to a primate emotional structure.
Well, monkeys, you're right. We Transhumans DO threaten your existence - and there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.
Have a nice day, Bonzo.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Thanks for bringing that up. Quite frankly, my reaction to this headline was "You mean they weren't already?" I very rarely see a good deal on eBay anymore. Most of the time the deals range from bad to horrible, paying 90% or more of the cost to buy from a reputable dealer. If you can't knock at least 30% off, you aren't worth my time.
The only good deals I've gotten on eBay in the last couple of years have been from pawn shops and similar selling things on eBay with "make an offer" buttons. Then, you're dealing one-on-one with a seller, trying to find a happy medium that you can both agree upon. Under those circumstances, you can get reasonable deals on eBay. Bidding in an auction? I won an auction about two years ago on something. That's the last time I found something at a low enough price relative to its value to make it worth outbidding the clueless hordes.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not all commerce is an auction.
Yes, that's why I said "if all commerce worked as you describe". I could have worded things differently without changing my point, which was that the system you describe is extremely biased toward the seller.
At auctions only 1 or a small number of items are put on sale. Each item may be owned by a different person, who wants to get the best price they can.
Yes, and sellers get better prices by having the buyers compete, similar to how buyers get better prices by having stores compete when there is a large supply. Does that mean that retail stores should have to sell for the lowest price they are willing to accept? Of course not. If they can price their items lower than their competitors, they probably will (though I realize the reality of pricing if often more complex than that), but that doesn't mean they should price them as low as they can afford.
Similarly, a buyer need only pay enough to out-compete the other buyers, as in the example I gave. Auctions that work this way still favor the seller (as will any free market situation where there is limited supply and more demand), just not beyond what is necessary. A buyer in a limited-supply situation must out-compete other buyers, but need not pay any more than that, as the minimum price that will beat all other buyers is, by definition, still a better price than the seller could get from anyone else. Let me repeat that in a different way -- if the person willing to pay the most stonewalls by refusing to pay more than the second-highest bid, the seller has no better options, and thus should still accept the price (assuming it was higher than their minimum threshold). Why do you think this is unfair?
Generally no, whatever a person is willing to bid is what they should pay if they bid the highest.
Could you give me a reason? What you are suggesting isn't true of any non-silent auction system I am aware of (not that I'm an expert or anything), so I'm not sure what you mean by "generally". Here's another example. On eBay, you type in a "maximum bid" of $100 for an item that has a starting price of $10 and no bids yet. Someone else enters a "maximum bid" of $75. eBay then automatically bids for you at $75 I believe, or maybe it increments a small about so that you've bid $75.50 or $76 -- the specifics are unimportant. Then no one else bids. You bid the highest! Does that mean you should have to pay $100, because that's what you are "willing to bid"? No, you should only have to pay $76, just enough to beat the other potential buyers. However, you said "whatever a person is willing to bid is what they should pay if they bid the highest", which would mean you should have to pay $100. I can see no logic in that, merely a system that blindly favors the seller as much as possible.
Don't bid higher than you're willing to pay!
Pay attention: I am not suggesting you bid higher than you are willing to pay. Contrary to what so many people here seem to think, there is absolutely no advantage to bidding higher than you are willing to pay in this system. (There are plenty of comments explaining why; there's no need for me to hash through it again.)
What I am arguing is that there is no reason the highest bidder should pay the most they were willing to pay, as opposed to the most that would beat out the other bidders. In fact, I would argue that in silent auctions where the highest bidder pays what they bid, many people probably don't bid the highest amount they would be willing to pay -- they take a gamble on trying to bid just high enough to beat the other bidders. The pay-the-second-highest-bid system encourages bidders to actually bid as much as they are willing to spend, and thus it takes the random element out of it -- the bidder who is willing to pay the most wins, while the seller gets a better price than they could have from anyone else. You won't get the same effect otherwise.
Here's wha
To discourage one rich developer from sniping the property with one outrageous bid and paying only the reasonable bid [...]
This system already does that. If two people make outrageous bids... guess what, the final price is the second-highest outrageous bid. It'll only take once of that happening to discourage that person from making outrageous bids. Furthermore, you gain nothing by making an outrageous bid instead of a reasonable bid. If you could "snipe" a property with an outrageous bid while paying only a reasonable bid, that means you could have made a reasonable bid and still won. Give me a concrete example of a situation where making an outrageous bid is better than biding the highest you are truly willing to pay. Please -- I don't think such a situation exists.
From TFA: In this case, however, the company concedes that the eBay seller could rightfully resell the makeup on eBay if, as she claims, she purchased the makeup at a flea market. Merle Norman, however, suspects that the eBay seller is in fact buying the makeup from a salon that, pursuant to its contract with Merle Norman, has agreed not to sell anything on the Internet. In other words, they're trying to claim a reseller is bound by the contract that their vendor signed.
Guess who loses here? Not the lawyers, that's for sure. This is a BS test case, and no court in the U.S. would rule against the reseller. Property is property, and a contract you haven't signed is non-binding.
Just because an idiotic lawsuit is brought, or takedown notices are served, doesn't mean it's actually winnable. The implication here is that Merle Norman is run by morons. Nothing more.
The other case is, to my mind, a misreading of IP law and compounds it with a misreading of Leegin. If you call out every ridiculous commerce suit ever brought to court, you're going to find a lot of stuff like this. It doesn't matter what gets brought to the bar. What matters is what the judgements are, or that people are settling out of court rather than fighting for their rights.
IMO, both cases are attempting to extend Leegin, which only states that cartel behavior is not always illegal. Both companies are trying to claim a non-existent right to determine all price, and shut down any reseller which will not meet their demands. This kind of extension is unprecedented, and I believe it to be totally unwelcome in the current conservative makeup of the High Court.
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Toro
if the person willing to pay the most stonewalls by refusing to pay more than the second-highest bid, the seller has no better options, and thus should still accept the price (assuming it was higher than their minimum threshold). Why do you think this is unfair?
If this person keep stonewalling he or she's not willing to pay more. It's unfair when someone bids the highest but doesn't pay what they bid. If he or she knows s/he'll only have to pay the second highest bid amount all they'd have to do as soon as the first bid is made to bid an astromonical amount. Say a seller puts a minimum of $100 and the first bid is for $101. All someone else would have to do as soon as the first bid is made is to bid, say $10,000 or $100,000, or $1,000,000. They could do this because they know they'd never have to pay it and if the minimum is only $100 yet someone bids an astronomical amount no one else will bid.
By having the highest bidder only pay the second highest bid it's real easy to quickly shutdown all bidding.
On eBay, you type in a "maximum bid" of $100 for an item that has a starting price of $10 and no bids yet.
Why in the world would anyone say what their maximum bid is? And why would eBay ask for it, if eBay does?
Pay attention: I am not suggesting you bid higher than you are willing to pay. Contrary to what so many people here seem to think, there is absolutely no advantage to bidding higher than you are willing to pay in this system. (There are plenty of comments explaining why; there's no need for me to hash through it again.)
As I wrote above, under a system the winning bidder only pays the second highest amount there is an extreme reason to bid higher than you can pay, by bidding higher you shutdown bidding.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If this person keep stonewalling he or she's not willing to pay more.
Close -- they're not willing to pay more if they don't have to. That doesn't mean they wouldn't pay more if necessary to beat another determined buyer.
It's unfair when someone bids the highest but doesn't pay what they bid.
No, it's not. It seems to me that you think so because, in your mind, a "bid" is defined as "the amount the person should pay if they win". Yes, by that definition, of course they should. But only because that is how it was defined in the first place.
Why in the world would anyone say what their maximum bid is? And why would eBay ask for it, if eBay does?
eBay does indeed ask for it. Essentially, eBay is trying to give the advantages of typical auctions (such as the top bidder only having to out-compete the second-highest bidder to win) without requiring the bidder to monitor the auction and keep bidding over and over. Read about it here. You'll notice that things work exactly as I have described in my two examples so far. The terminology here might be useful for us to come to an understanding -- you enter your "maximum bid", and eBay enters real bids on your behalf. That way, you pay what you bid, as you insist should be the case -- but yet the winner still only has to pay at most 1 increment higher than the second-highest bidder, as I have insisted is fair.
As I wrote above, under a system the winning bidder only pays the second highest amount there is an extreme reason to bid higher than you can pay, by bidding higher you shutdown bidding.
No, there is not. With eBay, if the starting bid was $100, and someone else has bid $101, and I then enter my maximum bid as $11,000, it won't display $11,000 as my real bid. It will enter a "real" bid of $102. If someone else then enters a maximum bid of $200, eBay would enter a bid for me of $201. And so on. So it does not shut down the bidding in any way. If you entered $11,000, and someone else has the same "bright" idea and enters $10,000, then you will automatically bid up to $10,001 (or some other increment -- I think the increment is dependent on the current high bid) and you'll have to pay $10,001. So, just as you have said, do not bid more than you are willing to pay!
The same thing happens with the auction type described earlier, for a different reason -- it is a secret auction. So, if you bid $11,000, no one else will know what you've bid, and they'll keep on bidding. If someone else bids $10,000 before it's over, and that's the second-highest bid, you'll have to pay $10,000. Again, do not bid more than you are willing to pay! This auction type is trying to achieve similar results to eBay, but without some of the problems eBay has due to open bidding. One example is called "shill bidding", a form of cheating sellers sometimes employ; another is the fact that people often get so emotionally involved in "winning" the auction that they wind up bidding an amount they later regret. With eBay's "maximum bid" system (if people used it correctly) or this other system's secret bidding (which is really the same thing as eBay's system, except secret), buyers won't be driven to bid higher by emotion, and thus the final price is more likely to be a good estimate of the market value.
If you still think it would be a good idea to bid an outrageously high amount, read some of the other comments. There are a lot that explain why it is a horrible idea.
As I wrote above, under a system the winning bidder only pays the second highest amount there is an extreme reason to bid higher than you can pay, by bidding higher you shutdown bidding.
No, there is not. With eBay, if the starting bid was $100, and someone else has bid $101, and I then enter my maximum bid as $11,000, it won't display $11,000 as my real bid. It will enter a "real" bid of $102. If someone else then enters a maximum bid of $200, eBay would enter a bid for me of $201. And so on.
That may be the way it works on eBay but that's not how it works at live auctions. At a live auction you don't tell the auctioners what your max bid will be. Nor will they automatically raise your bid for you.
And as regards auction winners only paying the second highest bid, as I said if someone wants to they can easily shutdown bidding by bidding a ridiculus amount. And you haven't offered a rejoiner. All you say, down at the bottom of your post is that others already answered that, can you provide a link to these posts? I haven't come across any posts that says anything about what I bring up with high bids.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That may be the way it works on eBay but that's not how it works at live auctions. At a live auction you don't tell the auctioners what your max bid will be. Nor will they automatically raise your bid for you.
True, but in real auction it is true that the highest bidder must only out-bid the second highest bidder. If I am willing to pay $100 for an item, but the most anyone else is willing to bid is $50, then I can win the auction for $51. Just like the system we're discussing.
And as regards auction winners only paying the second highest bid, as I said if someone wants to they can easily shutdown bidding by bidding a ridiculus amount. And you haven't offered a rejoiner.
You must not be looking at all the score-1 comments that go over this, in response to the many people who have brought up the same erroneous point you have. So, since you insist, I'll go over it again.
First, as I already said, this system is a secret auction. That means you can't shut down bidding with any of your bids, regardless of what they are -- because no one will see anyone's bids until the end. All bids are accepted, regardless of whether they beat the highest bid or not. When the auction ends, all bids for an item are examined, and the person who entered the highest bid is asked to pay the amount of the second-highest bid.
Second, what happens if two people enter outrageous bids? The second-highest bid is still outrageous, and that means the highest bidder must pay an outrageous price. So entering an outrageous bid is very risky at best.
Third, there is no advantage to an outrageous bid over an actual "highest you are willing to pay" bid. Imagine an auction that has a minimum allowed bid of $10, and you are willing to pay up to $150 to win. Imagine further that you make an outrageous $1,000,000 bid. If the second-highest bid was $100, you will pay $100. But if you had entered a $150 bid, you would still only pay $100 in that case. So what is the advantage of entering the $1,000,000 bid? Nothing. However, if the second-highest bid turns out to be $200, you'll have to pay $200 -- more than you wanted to pay. That wouldn't happen if you had bid $150. Or even worse, if someone else makes a $900,000 bid (trying to do the same thing you are doing), then the second-highest bid was $900,000 -- that means you will have to pay $900,000 for an item that you wanted to pay no more than $150 for. Which is a better idea? Bidding $150, or $1,000,000? Outrageous bids offer no advantage over a reasonable bid, but do create the risk of having to pay far more than you intended.
auction. That means you can't shut down bidding with any of your bids, regardless of what they are -- because no one will see anyone's bids until the end. All bids are accepted, regardless of whether they beat the highest bid or not. When the auction ends, all bids for an item are examined, and the person who entered the highest bid is asked to pay the amount of the second-highest bid.
Ah, I don't recall you saying anything about a secret bid, though others did in other posts. I'd be more willing to accept the winning bidder only paying the second highest bid but only if everyone submits one sealed bid. However no online auctions I know of nor any of the auctions I've been to IRL have done this. And yes, I have been to auctions held in a physical location, the last one was an auction held by the US Customs.
If I could afford it I'd regularly or semi regularly attend more, buy low and sell high. Heck, if I could I'd even go to real estate auctions and bid on houses. Usually they are put up on auction either because of back taxes or foreclosures. In both cases the property is usually ransacked and damaged, so they sale low. With some tlc and fixups they can be put back on the market and sold for more than what was put into them. I knew someone who made a living do this.
Second, what happens if two people enter outrageous bids? The second-highest bid is still outrageous, and that means the highest bidder must pay an outrageous price. So entering an outrageous bid is very risky at best.
That only works with secret sealed bids, not when an auctioneer is in front calling out the highest bid so far and asking if another will bid higher. "I've got $100, any higher, will someone go higher?" "Sure, I bid $1000!"
Imagine an auction that has a minimum allowed bid of $10, and you are willing to pay up to $150 to win. Imagine further that you make an outrageous $1,000,000 bid. If the second-highest bid was $100, you will pay $100. But if you had entered a $150 bid, you would still only pay $100 in that case. So what is the advantage of entering the $1,000,000 bid? Nothing. However, if the second-highest bid turns out to be $200, you'll have to pay $200 -- more than you wanted to pay.
Obviously then you waited too long to bid. Auctioneer: We have a minimum bid of $100, do I hear $100? Bidder 1: $100. Bidder 2: I bid $10,000. Bidder 2 wins and only pays $100.
Or even worse, if someone else makes a $900,000 bid (trying to do the same thing you are doing), then the second-highest bid was $900,000 -- that means you will have to pay $900,000 for an item that you wanted to pay no more than $150 for.
Again, you waited too long to bid, see above.
FalconShould there be a Law?
From this comment by me, which is part of the back-and-forth you and I have been having (emphasis added): That only works with secret sealed bids
Which is exactly what we (or at least I) have been talking about this entire time. The original comment in this thread of conversation said (emphasis added): To which you replied: That is how this started, and so I have been making the case for allowing the highest bidder to pay the second-highest bid under that auction type, not in auctions in general (which should have been clear from the "street-corner" and eBay examples I have given, where the highest bid is what I said would be paid). If you didn't understand what we were talking about, you should have paid more attention and/or read the Wikipedia link which explains exactly what we were discussing.
The "you waited too long to bid" scenarios you describe cannot happen in Vickrey auctions, and so they are irrelevant to this discussion. The only reason I brought up other auction types (eBay's proxy bidding and open bidding auctions) is to illustrate the fact that they, too, only require the highest bidder to pay more than what the second-highest bidder is willing to pay (if the bidder is smart and/or no one is cheating), and therefore the Vickrey auctions should intuitively have similar final prices to other auction types, despite allowing the highest bidder to pay the second-highest bid. That, and the fact that you said (emphasis added) "Generally no, whatever a person is willing to bid is what they should pay if they bid the highest.", which is not true even in regular auctions. Perhaps you meant "Generally no, whatever a person bids is what they should pay if they bid the highest.", but that isn't what you said.
I'm sorry if you didn't realize what I was talking about, but it should have been obvious from the thread.
Ah, I don't recall you saying anything about a secret bid
From this comment by me, which is part of the back-and-forth you and I have been having (emphasis added):
Sorry, I missed where you said anything about a secret bid, I see it now. Boy, I feel like such a fool. My memory is bad. Sorry to waste your tyme.
FalconShould there be a Law?