andrew fildes <afildes@netlink.com.au> writes: [snip] > However, the page may be short lived - he informs me that ebay has > thrown him off on the grounds that he may have infringed a patent > held by someone in the US. This sounds strange to me on several > grounds. Surely, any dispute (and the guy may not even have a world > wide patent, and may not even be kosher) is between the patent holder > and my friend? Isn't it incumbent on the patent holder to seek an > injunction? I would have thought that ebay are on very shaky ground > in simply banning his advertisement. May be ramifications of the Thugs' Charter, aka DMCA et al: if the people in the USA have more money than your friend, they claim to Ebay that some "rights" are being infringed, and Ebay have to remove the page - in principle your friend can start arguing, but in practice he probably can't afford it. Of course it's absurd; there is no such thing as a "world-wide patent", and US notions of what constitutes an "invention" are pretty skewed. Nonetheless, Ebay are subject to American law, and have to protect themselves. Doubtless their terms and conditions are written under the general American assumption that America is or should be the world. (Actually it's interesting that there was one "Nazi memorabilia" case in which the US judge ruled - absolutely correctly, of course - that yahoo in the US is *NOT* subject to French law, and may ignored French court rulings trying to tell it what to do. Unfortunately, awareness of the opposite situation seems to be longer coming.) Brian Chandler ---------------- geo://Sano.Japan.Planet_3 http://imaginatorium.org/
