tdlnx asks:
"Is it so bad that the person is borrowing your content? I'm not sure of the
exact details, but is the content something that could easily be published
under a CC or GNU FDL (Not sure if that would be a good license for digital
content, so it may not be the best choice.) license? Is the context in which
the content is being published unethical or misrepresenting you? Maybe I'm a
lot more lax with content I create but I believe it is good to use a CC
license or even donate it to the public domain so others can benefit."
In this particular instance, the user was using my photographs and
description to represent his item and to promote higher bids than he might
otherwise get. This has happened before, and for the same model item but by
a different seller. As you ought to know, condition matters a great deal to
the bidders, so my data, left on my website for information purposes (item
sold long ago) was used for a commercial purpose and to misrepresent the
seller's item, which he could have just as well photographed with his own
camera.
In another instance, my company sold a large instrument, which the buyer had
taken apart and packed by a reputable third party. Years later, the buyers
attempted to auction the instrument, but they used pictures which we had made
for the original sale, that showed the instrument assembled and in working
condition, to represent that instrument in the auction, when they actually
had never reassembled the instrument. I objected, and they cancelled that
auction. We would have suffered criticism if an unsuspecting bidder found
that he had bought a pile of boxes of parts instead of what he saw in our
photographs.
Free S/W is another matter. It's created and used by one person and donated
with the appropriate license for others to use freely, even for commerical
purposes, but it cannot be sold without including that same sourcecode and
appropriate license. Trisquel/GNU DVD's are good examples of this laudable
practice. With the all important sourcecode, every copy can be evaluated by
subsequent users.
In an Internet auction, all there is for the bidder to rely on is the
seller's representation of the item, and if that representation is false (for
another item that is different from the actual item in the bid sale) then I
will object to the use of my copyrighted material. U.S. copyright law and the
internet auction sites support me on this.
I'm still looking for a way of detecting those copyright transgressions.
