Ebay & Paypal vs. Australia

eBay - online auction web site which allows people to find items from all over the world to bid on or buy.

Paypal - online tool that allows you to pay for items online, especially eBay, without sharing your bank information.

From June 17, eBay buyers will no longer be able to use direct deposits, personal cheques or money orders to pay for items they win or buy on eBay. They claim this is to enhance security.

One of the issues that has arisen is Section 47 of the Trade Practices Act. It prohibits excluse dealing which involves one trader imposing restrictions on another's freedtom to choose with whom, in what or were it deals. Forcing customers to only use Paypal is not online unfair because it takes away our right to choose how we pay, but it is a blatant grab for profits on eBay's part. It may be more safe and secure, but it also makes eBay a lot more money from it's partnership with PayPal (Paypal was acquired by eBay in 2002). What gives them the right to tell its users how they are allowed to pay?

Another huge problem is for sellers who are forced to have Paypal as their only payment means. You are allowed to have pick up on your items but obviously that cuts down the amount of people that can bid because they are not local to you. The cost of eBay for a seller is atrocious anyway, without adding on the PayPal fees the seller has to pay. An eBay listing has an initial listing fee which starts with items 99c or under being 30c listing fee. Once the item has been sold, eBay take a percentage of the final price that the item is sold for. This can sometimes add up to a lot of money. If you put an item on for 99c and it is sold for 99c, you are still charged by eBay 5c (5.25%). This means that you have only made 64c. This may not seem like a huge difference, but once the items become more expensive, the more eBay take. To make this worse, Paypal take 30c + 3.4% of the amount that is put into your account.

The strange thing I think is that buyers don't have to pay more to use Paypal, it is the sellers that are getting stung every which way.

References

eBay Fees. 2008. http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/sell/fees.html (accessed April 19, 2008)

Fees - Paypal. 2008. https://www.paypal.com/au/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-fees-outside (accessed April 26, 2008)

Foo, F. 2008. ACCC to probe eBay policies. http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,23548903-15306,00.html (accessed May 4, 2008)

Download for FREE

In the digital age, people are increasingly searching for free information on the internet. File-sharing has become one of the most frequent activities people involve themselves in whilst surfing the web. There are sites like Napstar, Kazaa, Limewire and others of the like, that came about to provide free music to the online community. Even though Napstar and Kazaa have both since then been changed to suit copyright laws, Limewire still exists as a free mp3 file sharing program. It is not only music is being shared online. Download.com is a great site that allows you to find free programs or access limited licenses for programs. There are other websites that do the same thing, such as tucows.com. For the purpose of this blog I would like to focus on copyright. This includes the music file-sharing programs and the issue of pirating programs illegally to distribute to the community.

The file-sharing format comes about from the idea that the internet should be kept free and open. There is also belief that once you have purchased a CD or any other type of media, you have the right to distribute it as long as you are not profiting financially from it (Harries, D. 2002. p87). The reason that the corporate controls are maddened by this file-sharing operation is the money that isn’t being spent by those who are downloading for free. Years ago if you found an artist that you wanted to listen to, you would go to the record store and find the album and buy it. These days you are able to search for particular songs that you like, and download them for free to listen to on your computer, or burn to a disc to listen to anywhere.

Napstar was an online music file-sharing program that operated between 1999 and 2001 when it was accused of major copyright violations. Napster still exists but you now have to pay for the download of songs. Kazaa also had problems with copyright infringement and now only allows access to non-copyrighted material. So how do programs like Limewire get away with presenting this material? They are a few loopholes in the laws that govern this type of activity. Limewire tell you that you shouldn’t download files that aren’t from a accredited source, but it allows you to make that decision yourself. You are the one responsible for the infringement, if they tell you not to do it in the first place.

Copyright infringement is not only in relation to music sharing. You can download programs as well. Sometimes these programs that you might download aren’t the real thing. Torrent sites such as Isohunt.com allow you to download torrent files to your computer that provide the particular program you are searching for. You can download movies, games, television shows, and applications from these sites and download them for free. In these days, it is more difficult to tell the difference between a copy and an original. These programs that you find to download are often pirated. Software piracy is the ‘unauthorised copying, reproduction, use or manufacture of software products’ (Harries, D. 2002. p85). It is said that for every authorised copy of software there is at least one unauthorised ‘pirated’ copy that is made (ibid).

To sum up, copyright infringement is a never-ending issue for internet users. It is becoming harder and harder for the big companies to be able to bring down the people that are either downloading or creating these files. The quality of reproduced media is no longer something that is lessened in quality.

References:

Harries, D. ed. 2002. The New Media Book. London: British Film Institute