Geeklawyer stumbled across a rather dull story about eBay and its rules of conduct in relation to merchants. In summary if you do business on eBay you agree to lots of stuff. The stuff includes VeRO which is designed to assert the rights of an intellectual property owner against intruders. Thus if someone on eBay decides to punt stuff over which you have copyright trademark patent design rights, yada yada, you can shut them down at very short notice on little more than an email to eBay.
If you are such a rights holder that’s pretty cool. But it, kinda, pre-supposes a view as to who the guilty party generally is. Geeklawyer represents one or two rogues, it is true. But he also represents a lot of small people acting honestly and with a truthful and honest claim to their slice of the bazarre. rights that favour one side, as a dogmatic position, favour no-one - not even the rights holder in the long run.
These large monopolistic organisations like Microsoft Google eBay seek to alleviate their cost burden by the adoption of administrative protocols to settle disputes. Of course they do: it saves them money. But it is often the commercial weenie upon whom all productive commerce and commercial innovation rely who bears the brunt, rather than the well financed opponents; or gargantuan indolent second tier merchants like Google eBay et al.
The paralegal powers provided solely by the, arguable , Terms of Use serve no-one in the end. By insisting on imposing the overriding statutory obligations the High Court exhaled a welcome breathe of rejuvenating judicial air into the stale and incestuous atmosphere of online commerce.
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