Ebay shut off my internet
June 13th, 2009
So, a friend of mine fell asleep in my room last week, leaving me alone and bored - so I took a picture of him and decided to sell him on eBay. Of course, eBay removed the listing the next day just as one would expect - this didn’t matter because the joke was already over by then as he had woken up.
Normally I’d have a link to the eBay listing here, but that’s what this entire post is about. I saved a copy using Firefox’s save feature, and threw it up on my webserver, which is hosted (along with this blag) in my basement on my home internet connection. My ISP lets me do this for a fee. Apparently eBay doesn’t like it when you host copies of listings elsewhere - they apparently called my ISP and had them shut my internet off until I removed the listing. That’s right…. this and this is all I would see when I went to any website.
I called the number listed on the page and eventually, after removing the listing mirror, they turned my internet back on.
This is a generally bad thing because it shows what power a corporation and a threatening letter or phone call can have over an individuals content. While what I did may be against eBay’s terms of service (In fact, they own everything you write in a listing), there is little in place to prevent this kind of thing from being used to limit peoples freedoms (and eBay’s terms of service are harsh).


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