EBay Fined For Counterfeit Goods

France has ordered eBay to pay $63.2 million in fines to luxury good brands such as Louis Vuitton, because in addition to facilitating the sale of worthless lives, eBay also facilitates the sale of worthless goods - only the goods, unlike the gentleman, are sold as the real deal.

Having been found guilty of allowing the sale of fake and unauthorized goods, eBay may be forced to implement tighter regulations and practices to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods:

"The importance of today's decision is that companies like eBay are not simply hosts and, therefore, passive, they are also brokers," who make a profit from the sale of fake goods, LVMH's inhouse counsel Didier Malka said in an interview. EBay makes a commission on every sale on its site.

EBay will, of course, appeal the decision, citing its $20 million annual expenditure on counterfeit-sniffing and even went so far as to deride its assailants for making eBay "a focal point for certain brand owners' desire to exact ever greater control over e-commerce."

"We view these decisions as a step backwards for the consumers and businesses whom we empower everyday," the company added.

Legal issues aside, examine for a moment the sanity of purchasing widely-counterfeited goods like LV purses and perfumes from anyone other than a reliable retailer and expecting those goods to be genuine - let alone buying those goods online, let alone on eBay.

Then again, the whole concept of luxury goods can be fishy - while LV certainly does own its own trademarks, I find it hard to get behind an industry that wants to charge you $11,000 for a handbag when something awfully similar can be had for $11. Is a %1000 price margin on a tote bag ethically defensible, even when it's legally defensible?

EBay Fined Over Selling Counterfeits [WSJ]