eBay to GoHook: Go Away! eBay Bars Site from Hosting Completed Auctions

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"eBay told GoHook.com they cannot host completed eBay auctions on their site. GoHook launched last October with a service to help sellers store their completed auctions. GoHook downloads sellers' listings from eBay and other sites and stores them on GoHook.com in the same format they appeared on the auction sites. [...]
GoHook partner Robert Keller told AuctionBytes that eBay informed him GoHook was doing four things wrong: Storing completed auctions; violating eBay copyrighted material; scraping eBay data rather than licensing eBay's API; and commingling eBay data with data from other auction sites."

Sometimes eBay looks like the bastard child of Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Powerful in a way that feels often cheap and tasteless in a too-mainstream-to-be-good way, sometimes clumsy, but ultimately ruthlessly efficient and scary. Expect some serious antitrust trial or grassroot consumer/small biz protests when eBay is ten times its current size. Not that it's going to stop them.

05/03/04 update: AuctionBytes: eBay Elite Moves Mountains in New York City.

Category(s): web services ·

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