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Mobile goal-posts catch up with eBay in Paris court

Can eBay survive if there are more lawsuits in the pipeline like the one they just lost in Paris? Not, in our judgement, if they are forced to police this "virtual street market" as if it were a shopping mall.

In any street market in any part of the world, you're always taking a chance when you buy bargains and second-hand goods. My first visit to the famous Hong Kong "video-CD" district, nearly 15 years ago, pre-dated the existence of eBay - but not the existence of stolen and counterfeit goods. They have always been with us.

To navigate these e-street markets requires you to be e-streetwise. And most of us manage to avoid the more blatant rip-offs most of the time - which means that all the time, some innocent is being stitched up.

Individual customers are pretty much stuck with it. If they can prove that the transaction is a clear and indisputable breach of terms and conditions in the market, they can get compensation; but more often than not, it seems that there's a get-out clause somewhere which prevents eBay police from taking action.

The normal police forces don't even pretend to be interested in individual cases, as e-Victims recently pointed out on its own web site. As the ginger group said: "

Part of the lack of action is that people often blame victims of e-crime. They think that it is the victim’s fault for being stupid for falling for a scam. What people, who have never been a victim of a scam, fail to realise how sophisticated the scams become and that they regularly use intimidation."

"Take the simple question of buying something off a web 'auction' site. If you bid for it, it's an auction. If you use an 'instant purchase' option for the same device with a 'buy it now' type button, it ceases to be an auction and the transaction comes under a completely different set of consumer protection laws (remote purchase). Either way, if you go to the authorities, you'll probably be told it's none of their business."

What we should probably accept is that eBay simply can't operate as a small country, even if it turns over literally billions of dollars each year. It can maintain some guidelines, and it can enforce some of those guidelines, some of the time.

What eBay should accept, is that there are limits to how respectable it can be. A street market is a street market. Some stalls are honest, and offer a good deal. Others are fly-by-nighters, and there's probably no economic way of closing them down, without closing down the whole market.

On the whole, eBay does try. It has terms and conditions, and it genuinely does attempt to enforce the ones it has time to enforce.

But at the end of the day, the sign over the door should be a warning. Not, precisely, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter herein!" but at least: "Beware, pickpockets!"

For the big name firms like Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, lawsuits are feasible. For the rest of us, they aren't. That means that we're on the wrong side of the scales because the amount we have lost looks to be a tiny fraction of what it would cost the Authorities to track down and punish the miscreant.

You shop for bargains at your own risk, frankly.