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Susan Olson wrote in message ...
> FWIW ebaY probably owns only the format in which listings
> are displayed and the technology that makes the listings possible, NOT the
> listing information itself which is clearly the intellectual property of • the
> seller and any third party services like counters it chooses to use.
Certainly eBay owns the format and technology that makes the listings
possible. Certainly the seller owns the text used to describe the item. But
certainly eBay can not be forced to give away the information. Lets take
this to a print analigy. You write an article for my magazine. I print the
article in my magazine.
1. Can Joe Bloe copy your article from my magazine and put it in his
compendium without my permission? I'm pretty sure that copyright law says
no.
2. Can you force me to PAY to make copies of your article for Joe Bloe's
compendium? I should hope not.
3. Can you submit your article to Joe Bloe's compendium? Yes, assuming the
contract with my magazine did not have any clauses of exclusivity.
From this analysis, I read that another web site can not use eBay's web site
to gain the data (due to both 1 and 2 above). A quick glance at eBays TOS
suggests that they do not request exclusive access tou your listing
information, therefore, it would be perfectly Ok to my mind for a
consolidation service to allow you to submit the data, though this would not
give them access to the live current price (since that can only be obtained
by using eBay's technology).
Now I happen to agree with you that there is a problem if there is no way
for another auction site to compete. I suspect that eBay will eventually hit
a wall which will allow other sites to compete effectively. I don't think
they will be able to keep up with the growth. Eventually, the growth of the
search time to find the auctions you are interested in will outpace their
computing resources. At this point, a site which specializes in certain
product categories, will have a tremendous advantage. Buyers can actually
get to your listings. Of course eBay could counter this by splitting various
categories off onto separate servers.
Frank
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