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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.
Yes, that appears to be what they're trying to say. I hope they're prepared for a lawsuit, because somebody's going to see an opportunity to win a lawsuit against them. Interpreting any law to mean your customers can't resell their property is bound to get either the law overturned, you sued, or both.
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!
Now, here's where I get confused about this. If this company that's selling goods for cheaper is, in fact, buying them from you, isn't that still a sale?
Honestly, this isn't clicking for me. Sounds to me like they'd just be selling it at a loss...
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'
Perhaps the whole problem is that companies expect^H^H^H^H^H believe it is their right to make billions. Maybe profits are way too skewed towards the big corporate players that a totally free market is needed to put balance in the system. If someone wants to sell a comparable product at a fraction of the cost, so be it. Leave the courts out of it.
I got nothin'
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.
Just how are they going to punish a suicide for breaking the law? Extra nails in the coffin?
Of course, if the person committing suicide succeeds the laws against it are irrelevant.
However, like many crimes you can also be punished for 'attempting it'.
By making suicide illegal, police are allowed to intervene when someone attempts it. Courts are allowed to prescribe mental health evaluation, rehab, etc.
Personally I support a persons right to die... but I also agree that 'the right to die' shouldn't be extended to every distraught teen with a drug problem who just caught her boyfriend cheating on her. The decision to die is permanent, and you shouldn't be allowed to make that decision without proper consideration, or simply because you are suffering from treatable depression.
Very close! When ever I've heard of some law that screws the consumer over, in the guise of "good market intervention", it seems like there's private business behind it. E.g., DMCA, local anti-gas price war statutes.
But even with contract law, we can get screwed, and as history has shown us, the private sector has no problem ganging together to ensure we can't negotiate our way out of restrictive contract laws. E.g., software EULA. The only reason they don't seriously harm us is the State did protect us from some of the aspects of the EULA (but not all!)
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need the State to protect us from the marketplace, but since it is not ideal, maybe government regulation should limit itself to preventing bad contract conditions and nothing else?
But good point about pointing out the State aiding and abetting them.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
"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
My head asplode.
This is not insightful. This is evil, and demonstrably so. You are driving inefficiencies into the market, which ends up raising prices for everything for no reason. Everybody ends up with less. I shall endeavor to explain:
The function of the economy (pick a model, any model) is to distribute goods as efficiently as possible. Now suppose the natural equilibrium price for a good is 100 zorkmids, and you artificially constrict the market so that you can charge 300 zorkmids for it. What this does is cause 200 zorkmids worth of inefficiency in the marketplace. That 200 zorkmids more or less disappears. Instead of spending that 200 zorkmids on other things, the customer, well, can't. He no longer improves his house. He no longer buys new clothes.
So of course your answer is "Aha! But those zorkmids don't disappear! I have them in my pocket!" Quite. But because your customer buys fewer goods due to your unscrupulous overcharging, all those vendors have fewer zorkmids, and they buy fewer goods. And so it propagates across the entire economy, all the way back to you. Everyone ends up with less. This gets substantially worse when a lot of vendors start artificially constricting supply chains in order to (as they think) make more money. We all end up with much less then.
Conclusion: knock it off, you creep. You're hurting everyone.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
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....
Are you kidding me? I can't WAIT for a world with no stores. No more surly sales clerks, no more snake-oil sales clerks, no more presumption of criminality (papers! Ve need your papers upon exit!), I could go on and on.
I buy as much as I can online now and as imaging and bandwith increase, it will be easier and easier to buy more and more things online.
Gives me more time to spend time with friends and family and to do the things I enjoy, whatever they may be.
In other markets, companies cease to compete for market share irrespective of demand elasticity when the field is narrowed to just a handful of sellers via mergers, acquisitions, and initial predatory pricing. The equilibrium point you allude to when you say "there's a disincentive to lower prices beyond that except as a zero-sum game with competition" is one that is either tacitly or overtly agreed to by the remaining sellers. When sellers set 'minimum retail prices' that are all at this equilibrium point, the market is unequivocally rendered minimally competitive, just as I said in my original post.
In the minority of markets where price is not the only consideration, there is also an inherent lack of competition. You will agree that there is only one Apple computer company and only one iPhone at present (though I hear there is already a Chinese clone). If your utility is drawn from the brand and not from the functions of the product, then there are no real alternatives available, and again there is no real competition. This is common for two types of products: luxury items (clothing, jewelry, shoes, etc where brand is the primary consideration and price is secondary - something that only applies to people with discretionary income, which excludes about 90% of the world's population), and innovative technology items which, when first introduced, have no available alternatives. These markets, you will notice, are profitable because each seller is unique and there are therefore no alternatives.
The whole point of the article here is that companies are getting upset when folks on eBay sell identical products for a lower price. When one seller offers you a real alternative for a lower price, that is genuinely competitive, and that is why there is such a fuss here.
A-Bomb