Monday, November 15, 2010

EBay - Opting Out

Yesterday another collector informed me that a seller was using one of my photographs in their auction. How did he know? My name and copyright were clearly on the image. Today the auction was ended either by eBay (I filed a complaint) or by the seller, who apparently did not understand English or thought he was doing the right thing. He may have been!
I  checked eBay's rules about intellectual property and was dumbfounded by what I found.
First of all, there are so many links to follow that I felt like giving up.  One has to opt out of a program in which eBay can add your photos to their catalog for other sellers to use. I can't even find the catalog to see if any of my other pictures are in there. I checked my preferences and apparently I am already opted out.

I'm not going to waste space here copying the text of eBay's skewed policy so here is the link. 
What I want to know is where is this catalog? I did a search for 'doll' in their catalog and came up with nothing so how did this seller find my picture? He claimed that was where he got it.

I have sold books and cameras and the eBay system offered images and text for those items but I have never been offered a picture of a doll. Maybe the jerky seller thinks my Flickr account is an eBay catalog.

Meaningless, random, cute elephant image.

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