Slashdot Mirror
eBay Fakes Devalue the Craft of Tomb Robbing
James McP writes "According to an article on Archaeology, fake artifacts being sold on eBay have caused the bottom to drop out of the low-end artifact market. This outcome is exactly opposite to what archeologists feared would happen when eBay came on the scene. A side effect of more and more forgers getting in on the act has been a dramatic increase in high-quality fakes that can fool experts and illicit collectors alike, lowering the price for high-end artifacts as well. It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
So wait. Are you telling me that Lara Croft's are fake?
It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal.
May not be illegal but certainly misrepresentation is a thorn in eBay's side.
The auction depicted in the article reads "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and:
Origin: North Coast Peru
Culture: Moche
Culture Date: 50 A.D. to 750 A.D. Approx.
Notice how they said "culture date" and not actual date of the mask. The phrase "Pre-Columbian" is as misleading as "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and I think I would have a problem if I purchased this as it is a pretty misleading posting.
My work here is dung.
"eBay Fakes Devalue Lara Croft of Tomb Raiding"
Wow, who could have ever thought new technology could have beneficial side effects? That's just crazy.
I'm glad to see this get press. Maybe some people will think twice about jumping on the alarmist "Must Fear Everything New" bandwagon.
Then again, it double's their potential for attention-whoredom: make news talking up your baseless dire predictions, then make news with the shocking revelation that, not only did your predicts not come true, the opposite happened! Who could have seen this amazing twist ending!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Am I the only one that finds it a little odd that people are interested in purchasing items raided from tombs in the first place? O.o
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
But it is not "really" illegal.
Just as stealing $5.00 out of your girlfriends wallet may be illegal, but selling drugs to schoolchildren is "really illegal".
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I sell fake artifacts for the fake ebay artifact auctions, and have noticed this. I used to get three times as much for my fake artifacts (with aged certificate of authenticy). Because of this, I now write "This Artifact is Fake, Hoser" in the appropriate runes on each one I produce. They still sell well, and noone has caught on yet.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I wondered that original Holy Grail I bought of eBay was so gosh-darned cheap.
I think what the summary was aiming for was that the sell of fake items in and of itself is not illegal. If they are honest about the origins (or write their summaries cleverly enough) then it's not illegal. Kind of like the market for forged coins; not illegal as long as your not selling them as the real thing.
Demented But Determined.
I know, because he often rises from the dead in the middle of the night while I'm sleeping. He then proceeds to drink my beer, eat my chips and generally make a mess of the apartment.
He seems to have a penchant for microwave burritos as well. I can't remember any references to burritos in the Bible's chapter of "Exodus."
And he has been downloading porn on my computer, as well. Mummies seem to be into some weird kink. I'm kind of glad that I can't read Hieroglyphics . . . that's probably some nasty stuff that scholars have mistranslated.
If he was not such a valuable archeological artifact, I probably would have tossed the bastard.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What about authentic fakes?
So, the way to wipe out the illegal stealing and smuggling of ancient relics is to flood the market with cheap fakes. What other areas of unlawful exploitation can this principle be applied to? Drugs? Child porn? Bootleg music and movies? I believe flooding the prostitution market with fake girls has already been tried, but it hasn't been too successful at curbing demand.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This headline totally should have been:
eBay Fakes Lower Craft of Tomb Raiding.
My coworker is an amateur paleontologist. He has a reasonably serious collection that takes up most of his house, and does a lot of trading as well as collecting. He has a lot of stories about fakes.
"Dominican Amber" is this beautiful, amazingly clear, amazingly inexpensive amber from the Dominican Republic. Except that when you do some research, it all comes through one company, who has filed patents on taking ground-up amber fragments and re-melting them under pressure into new-old amber.
Likewise, there are some amazing specimens of fossil fish coming out of China, where their skins are fantastically preserved so you can easily see individual scales. Only, a lot of them are completely identical. They're not cast replicas, though: they took an original, cast or machined a negative in metal, then put pieces of slate on top of the negative and vibrated it until it has excavated a perfect copy into the slate -- so it's pure, natural, ancient rock with something that looks exactly like a fossil. In fact, it's pretty hard to tell the difference even for people who know fossils, unless they have a microscope and some time to inspect the edges where the fossil meets the rock.
He said there are also loads of intricate fossils, stuff with lots of fine features (like the tentacles on squids) that have actually been broken off, and a talented fossil restorer has just cut a new one in the rock itself to make the fossil look complete.
All of these, like the fake antiques, have made the real ones less expensive -- but at the same time, they make a market larger, because more people can afford to buy, and at some point that could make the demand rise sharply overall, even though the individual pieces cost less, still contributing to increased demand for originals.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
"selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
If you pretend it's real, it's fraud.
I think it's far preferable that a bunch of idiots on eBay buy fake "artifacts" than for real artifacts to be looted.
What's more is that I highly doubt that any court in the WORLD would think that these fools could have any reasonable expectation that these were in fact the genuine article. No reasonable expectation, no case.
My sig can beat up your sig.
What if you steal the drugs from your girlfriend's wallet and sell THAT to schoolchildren?
Case in point: my father collects roman coins and is quite expert. Recently he bought a coin on eBay that appeared perfectly real. But then some time later the same coin was for sale again. He contacted the other buyer and they traded high-res pics: they were identical down to the same defects. He then started a private inquiry on the buyers which led him to some russian (what a surprise) groups that sell perfect fakes on the Internet to people who want to then sell them on eBay. They do mass quantities (in the thousands). They even guarantee them against several types of scientific tests (including fluorescence and mass spectrography) ! I have no idea how they can do that, unless they have access to a certain amount of 2000 year old copper and other metals.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Why think so small?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They are very careful to avoid actually saying that the items are artifacts.
Anyway, what are you going to do, tell the police you bought an item you thought was illegal and it turned out it wasn't? Go ahead, cops deserve a laugh now and then. I am sure they will drop all the murder and rape cases and jump right on top of it. Just like cops jump on copy right infringement (note that the police doesn't, only prosecutors looking for a lucrative job after their public service).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Where's +1 "Indiana Jones" when you need it?
From Wherever to Whenever.
Wow, and if people would just RTFA, they could save themselves a lot of typing:
" ... It is true that fakes have been around for centuries. In 1886, the celebrated Smithsonian archaeologist W. H. Holmes described countless bogus antiquities in Mexico. A few decades later, Egyptologist T. G. Wakeling noted that many ancient Egyptian artifacts were, in fact, fakes. In the 19th century, American and European museums purchased large numbers of "Etruscan" ceramic vessels and sarcophagi that came straight from the kilns of rural Italian farmers. ..."
Think of all the hard working honest tomb raiders hacking their way through a jungle somewhere so that you can have your trinket from some dead culture collecting dust on your mantle.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
What we are seeing here is the archeological equivalent of cracking DRM.
Once pieces can be reproduced indistinguishably from the real thing at cost X, the value of the real thing trends towards X.
Archeology's DRM has been cracked.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The same has occured with the trade of endangered plant species to an extent.
The illegal trade of endangered flora has let to the destruction or near destruction of many species. Ebay sales have allowed people to trade plants that were grown in private collections rather than habitat and due to the risk of illegal habitat smuggling of plants, people growing them in cultivation can undercut those selling plants taken illegally from habitat.
This has allowed some highly endangered species to recover as the pressure from illegal smuggling has died away due to it not being worth the time for smugglers when mass growing at plant nurseries means they can be undercut to the point it's not even worth the smugglers driving to the habitat, let alone risking doing the smuggling itself.
Ironically though, the international process designed to help protect endangered species - CITES - actually hampers this because it prevents international trade of endangered plants even if they were grown purely in private collections and never grown in habitat, whilst smugglers ignore such regulations anyway.
As with this and as with artifacts there's a lot to be said about free trade of fakes, or in this case - privately and responsibly grown plants rather than restriction of it. It allows market forces to undercut costs of authentic specimens to the point where it's simply not worth smuggling from a monetary point of view. If more was done to support the trade of "fakes" rather than hamper it as per CITES I think decline of smuggling would actually help - it's better to prevent smuggling at the source and protect habitat than it is to try and catch it at the ports because again, smugglers will avoid the ports anyway.
They SHOULD be easy to reproduce. Almost all of truely antique pots and so on were made hundreds of years ago be just "normal indians" It is not like most of them were in their time "high art" it was jsut the vilage potter's work and likely sold for a small amount. The potter made these from local cheap materials that are still locally available and cheap,. Basically any skilled potter who knows what to do can turn out many pots per day both now and 500 years ago.
This is not the same thing as a fake Rembrandt oil painting. 1,000 years ago these pots were made by people of avgerage skills.