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EBay Pressured To Block Sales of Ivory Products
RickRussellTX writes "eBay is being pressured
by an animal welfare group to ban sales of ivory and animal tooth
products on its site. Although eBay is in compliance with the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species when it warns users that
such postings may be inviolation of national and international law, the
International Fund for Animal Welfare
is demanding that they go a step further to search for and delete any
posting of ivory products."
Where there is a demand, someone will supply, and a market will spring up. Perhaps eBay should get out on moral grounds, but if these folks think it will make a dent in the trade, they are naive.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
That will work great for my new eBay listing...
African Elephant - tusks removed - contains 0% Ivory!
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Well then - how am I going to sell my old piano then?
Ebay does not give a crap, so long as they get their cut. Want proof? Go ahead and report any of the THOUSANDS of Taiwanese bootleg anime DVDs on Ebay and see if even one gets yanked.
I'll save you some time - they won't. Last time I tried (and this, I will confess, was almost a decade ago) I was told to provide proof that I was the copyright holder.
Time for me to start re-selling Ivory Soap on eBay if they do. I love to help other folks train their word filters. Like the NSA. God is great, isn't he?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Yeah but black markets exist already and for many people the desire to possess such an item is not large enough to get involved with the black market.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Reading the story, it doesn't seem like there's a single demonstrated case of illegal ivory sale on EBay, just a lot of numbers being thrown around about ivory sales overall.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
As long as eBay is following the law they should tell those bleeding hearts to go pound sand.
I have no problem with this at all. No one in the world is supposed to be permitted to sell anything but antique ivory. So why would eBay be exempted from this?
But you can buy any old shit on ebay ...
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
The article is not 100% clear on whether an item must be older than 100 years or just older than the 1989 ban to still legally be sold.
Does anyone know?
I collect old straight razors, and have been looking to sell an old piano (not 100 years old, though) so the issue affects me personally.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
So just because there's no magic bullet everyone should just let them do it unimpeded?
Same for drugs, kiddie-porn and nuke warhead sales?
With that mentality, why bother doing anything which isn't easily accomplished in one small step!
...Live together in perfect harmony.
(let's sing together !)
-- Rastignac was here.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(Disclaimer: I'm the OP.)
The issue that bothers me, and it has nothing to do with elephants or ivory, is that eBay is merely a silent broker in these transactions. Could you realistically expect the relevant carriers of information to ban exchanges of ivory arranged over e-mail? Over postal mail? The telephone? At swap meets?
eBay has built the smoothest, most liquid, easiest-to-use method of arranging private sales between geographically disparate private parties. That results in transaction volume that far exceeds the capability of any single person to review it (and read TFA and you'll see that even IFAW built its statistics by doing the most basic text searches -- they didn't actually try to verify anything).
Organizations that like to tell people what to do and get themselves in the news, like the IFAW, hate such liquid markets. They want all transactions involving their particular interest to be monitored, filtered, verified, etc. Even though they are not willing to do it themselves.
So if we monitor, filter, and verify transactions involving ivory, where do we stop? Do we ever stop? Does private enterprise go away and get replaced by "monitored and certified enterprise"?
The International Fund for Animal Welfare is just trolling for attention. It's a tried and true technique. Attack a large and popular entity and charge them with the responsibility of handling your pet project to save the world.
How about this "International Fund for Animal Welfare"? Instead of bitching real loud, how about you bid for the ivory, then tell the sellers that you will pick it up. Show up at the seller's door with law enforcement.
Oh, I see. That doesn't get you free advertisement for your fund raising efforts.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"Ebay isn't interested in policing the existing business"
That's not true. eBay bans stuff on its site all the time. Like MMORPG gold. And that's legal everywhere. Before you can decide whether or not eBay will choose to ban ivory, you need to figure out what criteria eBay uses to ban stuff.
In the case of MMORPG gold, it was because large corporations wanted them too (and probably paid them). If people with a lot of power ask them to ban ivory, they might do it. You're right about the little people though. eBay doesn't care about them.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
1. Profit!
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Neil Armstrong reached the moon in one small step. Seems to me that's all we really need...
Where you gonna get a nuke warhead?
For the rest of your stupid argument - yes. Kiddie porn is already made, and drugs fall under "my body, my right."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
... sigh...
Do you EVER listen to people?
A) there is more to gun ownership than killing people
B) outlawing guns will do NOTHING to ensure that the police will be better armed than whoever they're about to encounter. You know, the whole "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" thing.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
They restrict weapon sales too, which are *totally* legal if done according to the state/federal rules.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Anyone who believes all these things should be legalised should live with a drug addict for 6 months. Believe me, it's not pretty.
*sarcasm* Oh, you're right! Nobody ever committed murder until the invention of the firearm, so if we divest ourselves of this terrible invention, we'll also eliminate murder!
Newsflash, a-hole. People have murdered each other since there were people, and they will continue to do so, be it with a knife, a club, or even a spoon. That is the problem with you liberals. You want to try to turn a dangerous world into a warm and safe cocoon for everyone, but the only way you can do so is through fascism. Your beliefs are as dangerous as they are ignorant. The data is overwhelming that gun bans only create victims. If someone is intent on committing murder, do you really think that a lesser law like a gun ban is going to stand in their way?
I'd say drug abuse definitely has a victim. In fact, anyone who's seen pictures of Amy Winehouse's skin condition has grounds to sue for emotional distress.
eBay needs a competitor who is willing to sell all the things eBay won't (lawfully acquired ivory, concert and sporting tickets of all types, legal second-hand copies of AutoCad, Scientology e-meters), along with everything else. Also one who takes payments other than PayPal. Someone like that ought to eventually eat eBay's lunch.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If people genuinely wanted to reduce trade in endangered species they'd support devaluing the products by ranching and harvesting the species instead.
Domestic cows aren't hunted to extinction.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Gun Control: The theory that 110 pound women should have to fistfight with 220 pound rapists.
|For the rest of your stupid argument - yes. Kiddie porn is already made, and drugs fall under "my body, my right."
At least until you wind up addicted and so far out of your mind you'll mug little old ladies to get your next fix.
Then I go to jail for mugging little old ladies. Problem solved.
Right, because drug companies selling legal drugs are so good about keeping the prices down.
Seriously, there's more at issue than just the cost of the drugs.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
At least until you wind up addicted and so far out of your mind you'll mug little old ladies to get your next fix.
Then I go to jail for mugging little old ladies. Problem solved. This solves the problem of you mugging little old ladies, but not the fundamental problem of what made you mug little old ladies in the first place.
The little old ladies don't like being mugged, and they tend to vote.
Isn't a "used nuclear weapon" a euphemism for "massive fireball hotter than the surface of the sun?" If so, one wonders how the shipping is handled...
I'm disabling ads until because I choose not to reward redesigns that are less usable than "view source".
Several decades back, one of the major animal control agencies in Africa investigated the issue of ivory poaching -- and to their own astonishment, discovered it was entirely a myth. Poaching simply wasn't happening.
And they discovered that those huge "elephant graveyards" had another cause entirely.
Elephants are grazers, NOT browsers. This means they eat, and are designed to eat, GRASSES. They are NOT designed to eat shoots and twigs, nor can they digest that much cellulose.
The elephants found dead in those mass graveyards all had one thing in common: a large ball of half-digested tree branches lying inside each carcass. NONE of them had the large-calibre bullet hole in their skull or ribcage that would be left by an elephant gun (you don't hunt elephants with a deer rifle; you hunt them with armor-piercing shells the size of a Polish sausage. And you get ONE shot -- and if it's not a clean kill, the elephant kills YOU.)
And their tusks had not been CUT off, as would be the case with a fresh corpse -- they'd been removed from the tooth socket entirely, as can only be done if the flesh has already rotted away.
Suddenly, all was explained. These elephants died not from being poached, but of impacted bowels (which if untreated is 100% fatal).
And why was that happening? It's a direct result of Africa's exploding population, and its need to feed that population:
Over the past 100 years, African agriculture has radically expanded. Huge tracts of grassland that were formerly open range are now fenced off, and have been variously cultivated for human crops, or overgrazed down to dirt. Along with several major droughts, this has pretty well destroyed the grasslands that were the African elephants' original habitat AND their major food source.
Starving elephants took to eating whatever they could find that looked halfway like food -- and that too-often meant brushy shoots and small tree branches, which they could not digest. And they died of it. Being social herd animals, they tended to die in groups.
When one of these graveyards was found by humans, they rejoiced to see all the free ivory laying around (already conveniently rotted loose from the skull), carried it off, and sold it. No harm was done to any living elephant.
But international opinion and law had already decided that all ivory must come from poaching, so these facts were, and still are, entirely ignored. Especially since this mythical "poaching" makes great press for animal rights extremists.
And impoverished Africans either lose the money they gain from selling the ivory left behind by long-dead elephants, or they sell it on the black market.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
A while back I tried to auction off a vicuna fur coat on eBay (from an estate sale), not realizing that vicuna is considered an endangered species. eBay curtly informed me of this fact and summarily deleted the auction. So why do ivory auctions only get a warning?
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
YEAH! I mean, look at how fast the US military conquered Iraq, confiscated all the guns, and left it in peace and harmo...
Oh, yeah...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You make it sound like the "black market" is a dark hostile entity that requires one cut off their left pinky-toe and murder a man.
The black market is everywhere. You probably know someone, who knows someone, who knows where to get Ivory. Or heroin. Or modchips. Or unlocked phones. Or dishnet cards. Maybe you know a mechanic who does work on the side, in cash. That's black market too!
The black market is anything and everything that either sidesteps legal control, or evades taxes. It is a term created by government (and the ethically fragile) to create an "Us vs Them" perspective against things that are beyond their control. If Bush were to outlaw the Qur'an, any sales of the book would be considered black market transactions. That's all it means.
For most people, honest or otherwise, it isn't much of a leap to acquire "black market" goods. It's not something that keeps people up at night in cold sweat. It's just some guy who doesn't give you a receipt with your purchase.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Why don't some of the countries in the area just breed elephants on farms as a livestock animal? You get the ivory as a valuable export. You get the meat to feed your people. You pull elephants way back from the brink of extinction. And so on.
Or you could get a job like my friend Ji had, working in fiddles. He says it was the bomb.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I slam no fiddle makers. Peace be upon him.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia