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eBay removing Raspberry Pi listings as they “encourage infringement”
- k_sze 6y agoI feel that this is the perfect opportunity to create a new auction site called “The Arrrr PIrate Bay”.
- eru 6y agoYou can try that, but as soon as you interact with the real world and especially with payment processors in the real world, regulation ensues.
- feanaro 6y agoWhich actual, real world regulation do you think legitimately leads to this removal of the RPi listings?
- eru 6y agoSorry, I had no particular regulation in mind. For the Pi, it's perhaps more about keeping other companies happy, companies with expensive lawyers, and not necessarily any specific regulation. But that's just my speculation. I was going for the general sense that eBay isn't being an ass here because it's fun, but because cover-your-ass has been beaten into businesses over and over again. Clever startups that want to do things better are possible. But they have to have real answers for what's different with them that will allow them to be better. (Same for when someone is proposing to rewrite software to get rid of all of the cruft. Much of the cruft is actually consists of under-documented scars from battles with corner cases.)
- sasaf5 6y agoTip: when a couple starts fighting around you in a coffee shop, turn off your laptop before watching them.
- k_sze 6y agoThis comment just completely flew over my head. Please explain?
- whoopdedo 6y agoIt's referring to Ross Ulbricht.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoFor context: FBI and DHS wanted access to data on Ross Ulbricht's laptop, which would be encrypted if the laptop is turned off, so they sent two undercover FBI agents to a library where Ross was, pretending to be a couple and staging a loud fight - distracting Ross enough to snatch his laptop while it was on. https://www.businessinsider.com/ross-ulbricht-will-be-sentenced-soon--heres-how-he-was-arrested-2015-5?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/ross-ulbricht-will-be-senten...
- wegs 6y agoIt's called Aliexpress. I've been gradually moving from Amazon to eBay to Aliexpress. Ironically, this happened because I got scammed on Amazon a few times. I figured if I was gonna get scammed, I might as well save a bit with eBay, and it seemed a bit more reliable. Then Aliexpress came out even cheaper, although shipping times are sometimes insane. Aliexpress also has real human beings. I got scammed there once too, and the result was human, efficient, and chaotic (partial refund, on a product worth $0). All-in-all, it was a lot better than talking to Amazon's recently-useless reps, or eBay computers. What's odd is Amazon had amazing customer service just a couple years back. And if I need quality/genuine, I order direct from the vendor most of the time.
- TheKarateKid 6y agoeBay is the worst for so many reasons. I can’t believe no startup or even big tech company has tried to make a competing platform.
- barbs 6y agoI imagine an auction-site like this is only as good as the number of people that are using it. What issues do you have with it? I find it's not perfect, but it generally works reasonably well.
- TheKarateKid 6y agoTheir account interface is so out of date. Parts of it still require you to use an interface from the early 2000’s. It’s a nightmare to navigate. The fees are high, and they even take a cut of your shipping fee. And yet, they still have 3rd party ads all over. Their rules and policies are strange and one-sided, just like this one. Poor customer support.
- jen729w 6y agoStrong disagree. eBay has become a cesspool. I finally rage-closed my account after carefully listing a thing, monitoring the auction, being happy when it sold, and then having the buyer casually tell me that they didn’t need it after all. I remember when clicking the ‘make a bid’ button actually meant something. Wasn’t there even a warning along the lines of ‘you are entering in to a contractual obligation’?
- tdeck 6y agoI sold an Apple IIgs that had a monitor in one of the photos to show it worked, but clearly explained that the monitor wasn't included in the first paragraph of the listing. Someone bid and then emailed me asking me to cancel their bid because they didn't realize it didn't include the monitor, having taken a closer look. THEN the next highest bidder won, and after winning they must have bothered to read the listing because they emailed and canceled theirs as well. I'm not used to selling on eBay and was shocked that people are so careless. Apparently even for unusual vintage items they just glance at the photo and then bid.
- userbinator 6y agoThe irony of this is that the RPi is far more closed and proprietary than regular PCs and their components, of which you can find plenty of listings for on eBay... I hope this was just a mistake and done due to other reasons (they thought these were fake RPis?)
- londons_explore 6y agoThey probably are scanning to remove all retropies (often sold as a package including tens of thousands of pirated games) and pirate streaming TV boxes.
- cocoa19 6y agoIronic that people buy it for streaming media (pirated or not), but RPi is terrible for video playback. I have an RPi4, tried kodi (libreelec OS) and vlc on raspbian, both apps stutter with most videos at 1080p. Luckily I repurposed it for IOT so I'm pretty happy with it.
- ohthehugemanate 6y agoThat's not usual. Are you sure you had hardware decoding working?
- schappim 6y agoIt really depends on the codec support. The Pi4s have hardware support for H.265 (4Kp60 decode) and H.264 (1080p60 decode).
- BlueTemplar 6y agoI have issues with VLC showing a black screen when the (H.265) video is maximized. Would you by any chance know what the issue is ?
- schappim 6y ago
- schappim 6y agoWhat is worse is the use of "no-reply" email addresses and the total lack of recourse when the algorithm gets it wrong. We see it every day from folks who get locked out of their Google accounts to the shenanigans carried out by online marketplaces (including both service and product marketplaces). Something has to give...
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoOn the bright side, eBay isn't a monopoly and this literally costs them money.
- sneak 6y agoWhere else is there a global, highly liquid market for secondhand goods like this? I’m not asking to be snarky, I just don’t know of any and would love an alternative to eBay.
- Accujack 6y agoThey're a de facto monopoly. The only thing they have that could be called "competition" is Amazon, and Amazon isn't quite an identical business.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoYeah, no-reply emails are unbelievably rude.
- Krisjohn 6y agoDidn't take me long to find that they have a "RetroPie" listing. I think this is going to be a lot more grey than first glance.
- schappim 6y agoGood guess, but that wasn't what eBay delisted. They did however feel the need to delist "8GB MicroSD Card with NOOBS 2.0".
- varenc 6y agoDo you have a list of everything they delisted? Super odd that they'd remove that listing, but leave your listings for 16GB/32GB cards with NOOBS. Thinking optimistically, this is looks like accident of some sort and if you can ever actually get a response from eBay they'll realize it.
- mewse 6y agoI bought my first two RPis from Little Bird, the company whose tweet is linked (albeit through one of their web stores, not via ebay). Those were an original RPi model B, now sadly retired (it still works, just is very slow even for running basic services), and a 3B+, now faithfully serving as a PiHole and HomeBridge machine. I have a surprising number of RPis around the apartment now; a PiZero with the HQ camera module is serving as a webcam for my desktop machine, and another one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). And another zero is controlling a set of “presence” indicator lights, watching bluetooth to determine who is in the apartment at any given time. That makes it so that if one of us is leaving the apartment, we can easily tell whether we need to lock the door on our way out, without needing to go searching through the apartment to check whether another flatmate is home or not. (I found that for us, testing bluetooth was far faster and more reliable than testing arp, wifi, bonjour, geofencing, or etc) ... and I’ve just ordered a moderately large e-paper display which is destined to be mounted with a zero inside a picture frame and hung from the wall like a photo. Haven’t decided exactly what to show on it yet; probably will show a weather forecast and how long until the next tram will arrive at the stop outside our building. That kind of thing. Plus, of course, the pi 4 that I just use as a generic linux box for my own amusement. These little projects have been such fun little creative outlets; I’ve very much enjoyed coming up with and implementing them over the past few years!
- formercoder 6y agoCool stuff, check out the ESP32 if you want to get smaller.
- mewse 6y agoESP32 is one of the Arduino-compatible boards, right? I keep bouncing off Arduino stuff just because I find their IDE to be astonishingly awful (at least on Linux, running inside a dwm window manager) I’d be 100% on board if I could write the code in vim and ideally compile/upload from the command line. Maybe a nice makefile. And I did set that up for a few arduino devices in the past, but it was just too much jumping through hoops for me to really bother with longterm. Much easier to just grab a RPi Zero and install a compiler or python on it and then just code directly on the device, over ssh. If there’s a better approach to handle the coding side of things than the standard Arduino IDE, I’d be super interested to learn about it!
- dheera 6y agoAnd they didn't do a damn thing about price gouging on N95 masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectants during a pandemic. I reported dozens of listings and they didn't do anything about them.
- RedShift1 6y agoI feel like the market will automatically correct? Nobody buys this overpriced stuff?
- dheera 6y agoNot really, because people still need masks, and at that time, everything else was sold out, even the local shops. Lots of people overpaid, and it went into the hands of some eBay armchair hoarders.
- eurg 6y agoIt's easy to quote a low price if you have zero stock to sell. The alternative was not masks available at low prices, the alternative was no masks.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoNo, the alternative was masks at regular prices with sales restricted to hospitals and industries (jobs that need N95 or better for occupational safety), and unallocated flow sold out on consumer market with purchase limits.
- pmiller2 6y agoThis is not a thing the "free market" can do. We need to get PPE into the hands of hospitals and healthcare workers above all. The "free market" is literally designed to make that not happen, if someone else with more money is out there and willing to pay more money than the hospitals.
- 6y ago
- Paul-ish 6y agoThis reminds me of a tangential matter. The Rasberry Pi has a built in hardware decoder for MPEG-2. You can pay a licensing fee and enable the decoder. This is despite the fact that the relevant patents on MPEG-2 have expired in the US and much of the world[1]. The issue is that there are still active patents in Malaysia[2]. [1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/939 https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/939 [2] https://bryanquigley.com/pages/mpeg2-patent-tracker.html https://bryanquigley.com/pages/mpeg2-patent-tracker.html
- Namidairo 6y ago> The Rasberry Pi has a built in hardware decoder for MPEG-2. Well the older models did, yes. I don't believe the Raspberry Pi 4 has one anymore. (And the CPU can probably handle it just fine as well)
- cheese65536 6y agoI regularly use software decoding on the 3B+ for (legally) recorded over-the-air (ATSC) MPEG2 content and it handles 1080i@30 and 720p@60 just fine. For some shows I watch at 150% speed and it still handles it.
- dane-pgp 6y agoThat second link is interesting and perhaps needs to be updated given that it says: > Please be aware to renew your patent before this date is reached, or else your patent will become expired. 14 Sep 2020 (and earlier dates for the other 2 patents). Following the link to the MPEG LA site, though, indicates that they believe the Malaysian patents are still valid as of October 2020. https://www.mpegla.com/programs/mpeg-2/patent-list/ https://www.mpegla.com/programs/mpeg-2/patent-list/
- jimbob45 6y agoWhat’s up with the RIAA and MPAA this year? Feels like their lobbying has gotten out of hand.
- bencollier49 6y agoPerhaps they finally feel that if one of their cases ends up in the US Supreme Court, they'll have a sympathetic audience.
- cheese65536 6y agoShouldn't the more conservative court be against Hollywood liberals? /s Yes, I know you probably mean the court will be more corporatist.
- salawat 6y agoTwo words. Captive audience.
- flyinghamster 6y agoLooks to me like they see a perfect opportunity in the tech backlash to try to get their own licks in.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThe movie theaters dying and streaming as king making them panic?
- cmdkskdhl 6y agoEncourage infringement of what? Methinks ebay just can't deal with conflict in any reasonable way, which is perfectly in line with their reputation of being a marketplace without any sane method of conflict resolution.
- Netcob 6y agoI checked, and they are still selling knives. Sure, you can use a knife to cut food or walk through the woods pretending to be a "survivalist" (judging from my search for "knives"), but it can also be used to murder people. But also checked "TVs", and they are absolutely still selling those. TVs are like the number one item used for infringement. I am VERY confused. And don't get me started about food. Without food, it's basically impossible to infringe, yet ebay allows all sorts of food listings.
- simongr3dal 6y agoThey also sell HDMI capture cards and HDMI splitters that can remove HDCP. As if those aren't encouraging infringement.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Simon_says 6y agoWhich ones? So I know to avoid them.
- judge2020 6y agoI believe ones with 'hdcp bypass' are the ones you should stay away from https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1311&_nkw=hdcp+bypass&_sacat=0 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
- Shared404 6y agoOh thanks. I was worried I might break a law or two there. To be super careful, I'll leave a comment to save the warning.
- judge2020 6y agoYou can also favorite[1] HN comments by clicking on the timestamp first. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073
- classics2 6y agoOoooh I see it’s new trust and safety employee week at eBay. Wait until PayPal bans them for life for the same thing using the exact same language. Fun times.
- sundvor 6y agoAll these moves to block make me want to discontinue some paid services and return to torrents. Just saying.
- _0ffh 6y agoHave the first tendrils of the coming war on general computation reached into the present?
- rektide 6y agoThe war never ended, but it sure does look like scary strong Authoritarian deeply vested special interests like RIAA are gearing up for a major offensive against the right of humans to compute & think as they may/might.
- yodelshady 6y agoSympathies to Little Bird, who don't seem to be retroPie resellers (I assume, what the source was). Raspberry pi's do seem to be listed on ebay.com.au... Side note: wow are they expensive down under.
- globular-toast 6y agoCopyright continues to be a scourge on society. This was recognised decades ago by many people and yet here we still are.
- jcmontx 6y agoThis is the most stupid thing I’ve ever read
- jijji 6y agoebay has so much red tape to be able to post anything on there im surprised people still use it. Not to mention the fact that they take 15 percent of whatever you make, so any potential profit you thought you might make on selling something is diminished...
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI saw this post pointing out that eBay still takes no action against obviously counterfeit Nintendo products. [0] Nintendo are known for being litigious, but this has been going on for years. Does anyone know what's going on here? [0] https://twitter.com/Kavawuvi/status/1323587131974045696 https://twitter.com/Kavawuvi/status/1323587131974045696
- motohagiography 6y agoPrediction: the "infringement," definition will expand to cover anything that enables people to limit the surveillance capabilities of their devices, or to organize themselves socially outside official tech platforms. People thought the DMCA was just about entertainment, but it's about regulating culture and how it impacts politics. Literally the "means of production," for culture. I had included a list in this comment of what I was betting were next on the list of "infringing" technologies, but why give them a map? If there is a legal precedent that can be leveraged and abused to an authoritarian end, expect it to be so in the near term.
- rusk 6y ago> If there is a legal precedent that can be leveraged and abused to an authoritarian end, expect it to be so in the near term. Sounds like a corollary to Stallman's Law! [0] [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallmans-law.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallmans-law.html
- swiley 6y agoI heard eBay has been taking down PinePhone listings as well. Their reason was that PinePhones might be used for hacking.
- bovermyer 6y agoSo what are you, dear HN, going to do about it?
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoIs that a reference to a scene from Blues Brothers?
- bovermyer 6y agoNo. It's a request for someone to do something about it rather than just talk about it.
- totalZero 6y agoAlthough eBay's motivations are probably not benevolent, and the implementation of this policy harms a reputable distributor, I do think this is a good thing overall. There are several different authorized distributors of RPi; listing RPi on eBay simply offers another vector by which counterfeit/damaged/problematic devices can be sold, and the existence of a secondary market (eBay used buyers and sellers) for RPi also reduces the demand (revenue) for new devices. I buy mine directly from one of the authorized distributors provided by the project's website.
- deelowe 6y agoIn your opinion, it's a good thing overall for ebay to ban a legitimate business over completely baseless copyright infringement claims because there might be a knock on effect causing some counterfeit manufacturers to get banned as well? What? No, this is a terrible precedent. Ebay needs to explain what's going on here.
- totalZero 6y agoIf I translate that from Snark to English, I get "In your opinion, is it a good thing overall for eBay to prevent a legitimate business from selling a particular hardware product, and claiming that it is due to a violation of one of their stated policies, because there could be positive implications for the community that uses that hardware product?" My answer would be "yes." BTW it's the product that was removed, not the business itself. One of the nice things about RPi is that it is cheap and commoditized. WYSIWYG. One of the bad things about knockoffs is that their faults and authenticity are not discoverable at first glance. Also, I don't see what eBay needs to explain. They are preventing a product from being sold on their for-profit platform. You're talking about it like it's a Supreme Court decision and nobody wrote a majority opinion.
- dwild 6y agoEveryone here argue about how this is incoherent with them allowing to sell others things... while the real question is why they did this. Someone else mentions they take 15%, I though it was higher, but let's go with that. Why wouldn't they want to make bank over theses Pi, even the ones actually in a grey area. Let's be honest, this is coherent with Ebay, they want to make cash, like any other business, and something would cause them to make less of it if they were to sell Raspberry Pi. Someone else mentioned RIAA/MPAA, which would make sense with the copyright stuff, but why wouldn't RIAA/MPAA fight all the other ones too? So here I am, asking myself, who would want to stop Raspberry Pi from being sold, or for Little Bird Company to stop selling stuff.
- ajmarcic 6y agoPure speculation, but it's more difficult to fingerprint device users when buying used. Linux is obviously more protective of privacy, as is the entropy of having many near-identical setups.
- treis 6y ago> Everyone here argue about how this is incoherent with them allowing to sell others things... while the real question is why they did this. Actually, the real question is "did they do this". And the answer is, no, they didn't. Raspberry Pi returns 50,000 items and all sorts of new and used kits. Whatever listing got removed was either by mistake or because they were selling something more than just a Raspberry Pi.
- ajmarcic 6y agoThe answer is, yes, a small third-party used listing was removed by eBay. The fact that large retailers are recirculating used Pis has no bearing on what makes this intriguing (see my reply). The open question is whether this is part of broader efforts by parties such as eBay or the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- treis 6y agoThere's plenty of listings from individuals and small companies. No open question. Anyone can buy or sell Raspberry Pis on ebay as evidence by the thousands of people doing that.
- jvanderbot 6y agoIt might encourage an uptick in fraudulent PIs? It's a hot, easily-imitated item.
- mariuolo 6y agoInfringement of what? Could they ever be more vague than that?
- Fwirt 6y agoFor everybody bashing on eBay here... I'm just legitimately curious, can you recommend a service of similar visibility and quality in the US where you can sell used junk (old game consoles, appliances, collectibles) without being a business? I still use eBay because as far as I know they're still the best service in that segment of the market, but I'm open to other suggestions. I have tried Craigslist, OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace (yuck) etc., but honestly the selling experience has been even worse than eBay. EBay skims 10% off the purchase price, but even listing at 20% below eBay selling price on other services leads to people lowballing you and then not showing up to get their stuff after you waited for them for an hour. At least with eBay if somebody flakes out I can just relist the item in a couple minutes and wait for it to end again.
- thirdsun 6y agoIndeed. It's rarely mentioned but eBay still offers the most streamlined selling experience and the most attractive selling prices, despite the 10% fee. To me it seems as if buyers on eBay are just as tired of time-wasting, long-shot negotiations as sellers - which is a good thing for both sides.
- decibe1 6y agoI've only seen Pi's used for hobby projects. Can someone help me understand what 'infringement' app/project they are accused of being used for?
- redwall_hp 6y agoMy guess is Kodi and MAME boxes. They're big for retro gaming or media centers.
- White_Wolf 6y agoI wonder when they'll ban laptops and PC's. The ammount of infringement going on on those is off the charts.