Truly valuable stuff is usually safe to do that with.

Yet eBay reviews and pull items that are suspected of being fake. Your supposition is that an item must be fake based on its cost. If you like, I can find lots of situations such as this:

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/experts-confirm-rembrandt-laughing-is-a/n20080618121109990004

In that case a Southby’s auction house sold a painting for a very low price that later turned out to be a real Rembrandt. The winning bid was approximately $1500 for a painting that is worth $30 – $40 million. Experts at the auction could not or did not verify the authenticity of the painting as being an actual Rembrant.

According to your theory, Southby’s should be held accountable for selling a $30 – $40 million dollar painting at a cheap price.

According to you, since the painting sold cheaply, it must be fake.

Yet as the article details, it was not a fake and therefore your supposition is wrong.

eBay turns a blind eye to a lot of illegal material that is sold on its site, such as kiddie porn, warez, and pirated software.

Sorry, but your statement is contrary to facts. EBay does have programs in place (as cited in the CNet article) to prevent such frauds. They are not turning a “blind eye” to anything and work with sellers and original manufacturors.

Also, how is this any different than the copyright infringement suits pending against YouTube?

Are you saying that YouTube doesn’t remove copyrighted material when they are notified? Are you saying that eBay doesn’t remove items when notified or items that don’t pass its own inspection?

Also, how is this any different than the copyright infringement suits pending against YouTube? The theories are similar – YouTube knows or should know that copyrighted material is being posted to their website, yet doesn’t remove it, all the while running paid advertising next to the infringing material, hence profiting from it.

Absent of actually inspecting the item in person, what more can eBay do?

and

Tiffany’s approach of “stop all sales” takes the position that a legal Tiffany item, bought at Tiffany’s, is not the possession of the person who bought the item. Tiffany’s wants to have control and rights over those with legal possession of goods

Those are the meat, here. Any question eBay asked could simply be answered with a lie, and eBay has no way of knowing. Tiffany’s has some ways of knowing (they won’t catch all fakes, I’m sure).

So, either third-party auctions are simply impossible (Tiffany’s owns the stuff they suppoedly sold you), or Tiffany’s just has to get over it, as eBay is already doing as much as it possibly can with the format in question.

(Also of interest is that the court refused to adopt the 1-800-Contacts analysis/extension that a number of other district courts have in the Second Circuit on trademark use. Depending on how the Rescuecom case comes down, that could prove prescient or an alternative basis for affirmance.)

With all due respect, I think that statement is overly broad.

From this CNet article:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9990543-93.html?hhTest=1

“For its part, eBay says it spends $5 million a year in maintaining its fraud search engine, which has 13,000 rules that are designed to identify counterfeit listings based on words such as “replica” or “knock-off.” Listings flagged by the search engine are manually reviewed by customer service representatives.”

“In addition, eBay offers a Verified Rights Owner (“VeRO”) program that lets trademark owners report and remove infringing listings. Tiffany is one of more than 14,000 companies and individuals participating in the VeRO program.”

……

“On Monday, Judge Sullivan put an end to that argument: “As a factual matter, there is little support for Tiffany’s allegation that a seller listing five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry is presumptively trafficking in counterfeit goods.” In addition, Sullivan concluded that eBay always removed listings promptly after receiving notification from Tiffany, and noted that eBay delayed listings of Tiffany products by 6 to 12 hours to provide time for a manual review. ”

Additionally, Tiffany’s lawyers had demanded that eBay stop users from selling any and all Tiffany merchandise – even the genuine article.

Absent of actually inspecting the item in person, what more can eBay do? Or rather, what more should they be expected to do?

I realize that conterfeiting is a problem and an issue for auction sites, but Tiffany’s approach of “stop all sales” takes the position that a legal Tiffany item, bought at Tiffany’s, is not the possession of the person who bought the item. Tiffany’s wants to have control and rights over those with legal possession of goods because of the actions of a few criminals.

Go after the crooks – not the law abiding citizens.

Trouble is, how are the courts and governments going to enforce these judgements? I guess they can go after well-organized sellers like e-bay now, but what about less organized ones, like CraigsList? And what about local BB lists? I guess they could eventually go after Google…