ITGS HL Exercise 1.1 - Case Study

Answer the following questions from the article below

1. In one or two sentences for each, identify the main issue for each side of the argument. (4 marks)
2. What does your moral intuition say about this case? Who is right or wrong and briefly give a reason why you think so. (2 marks)
3. Briefly describe a solution that would benefit all interested parties the most. (4 marks)

Spiders at the Auction

eBay, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful commercial sites on the entire World Wide Web. Founded in 1995, eBay introduced customers to an innovative business model that brings buyers and sellers together in an engaging auction format in order to buy and sell many different items such as coins, consumer electronics, antiques, appliances, and so forth. Products sold on the Web site can range from a $1 baseball card to a $578,000 Shoe less Joe Jackson's baseball bat. With 38 million customers, sales for 2002 were projected to be $1 billion returning a net income of $150 million. eBay carries no inventory so it can keep costs low. But the biggest reason for success derives from the fact that eBay is "a master at harnessing the awesome power of the Net-not just to let customers sound off directly in the ears of the big brass, but to track their every movement so new products and services are tailored to just what customers want.

eBay has had several disputes with auction aggregator services which accumulate data from different auction sites so that a consumer can see what is available at all these different sites. The advantage for the buyer is the ability to see if a product available on eBay might be available at a lower asking price on a different site. One such dispute oc­curred in 1999 with an aggregator service known as AuctionWatch. The AuctionWatch site offers a "Universal Search Function" which allows users to access the price, product, description, and bidding history from popular auction sites such as eBay, Yahoo, and amazon.com. For exam­ple, if a user were interested in Boston Red Sox baseball memorabilia, that individual could check the AuctionWatch site to ascertain all of the Red Sox memorabilia available for auction across multiple sites.

AuctionWatch relied on spider technology to locate this data at these different auction sites. A spider is a robotic search engine that can crawl through sites many times a day to extract shopping data. Accord­ing to Karen Solomon, "The benefits of bots for consumers are indis­putable, but some merchants are less than thrilled about the technol­ogy's parasitic presence."

eBay officials were certainly "less than thrilled" with Auction Watch's constant forays into its computer system. They asked the company to stop, but it refused to contain its auction bot activities. eBay claimed that its auc­tion data was proprietary, though that data was not eligible for any copy­right protection. eBay also argued that the auction bots burdened its servers and perhaps impeded performance for its regular customers.

Given AuctionWatch's categorical refusal to curtail its intrusive ac­tivities, eBay executives met with their lawyers to discuss the next step. Should they simply allow the auction bot to continue? Should they pur­sue legal action? One possible legal angle to deter AuctionWatch was to accuse it of "trespass to chattels." Trespass to chattels represents a tort action for the unauthorized theft, use, or interference with another's tangible property.J4 But was this bot really "trespassing" on eBay's prop­erty, including its servers? Hasn't eBay made its Web site available to the public on this public network?