Way back when, we all read about the gentleman, web developer George Hotelling, that tried to re-sell his Apple iTune on EBay. He posted Frankie Smith's "Double Dutch Bus," which cost him 99 cents. In a brilliant move, Hotelling said that he wasn't in it for the money and to prove his point, all proceeds above the original purchase price was going straight to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He had struck a nerve with a group of music lovers frustrated with online music controls. Before long, the bidding drove the price up to nearly 16,000 dollars US.
Although it didn't appear that he was breaking any laws, the next day, the folks at EBay pulled it and that was the end of that. Ebay executives then decided to add digital download
music to their forbidden list, along with other questionable items such as weapons, corpses and drugs. However, apparently due to the success of iTunes and other music download services, there seems to be some second thoughts on this issue, read on:
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"We don't want to blow this out of proportion '” this is a pilot program to see if there's even any demand," said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy. "Much of what happens on eBay happens because the community takes us there, and this is essentially giving the community a way to see if we should create this new venue." The experiment, announced this week in a posting on eBay's Web site, reverses a longstanding policy at the world's largest auction company. |
The article goes on to say that they are making sure the sellers "own copyrights to the songs". So these must be some independent musicians they are alluding to. You can view the rest of the article at Yahoo!
Source: Yahoo!
