Ebay's Indian arm Bazee.com's CEO Arrested

[gopi]

[news.google.com...]

Avnish Bajaj, CEO of a popular Internet auction portal baazee.com is arrested in Delhi on Friday for allowing the sale of pornographic VCDs showing two Delhi school students in an explicit sexual act.

What a foolishness , how come an auction site would be liable for the legality of the content posted by its members! - a very very wrong precedence set by indian police officials!

[bill]

That's unfortunate. It does seem that a lot of the press is looking at this in the same manner you gopi...foolishness. From what I've read it does seem very odd that they would go after the CEO in a case like this. The only thing you can hope for in a case like this is that some reform of the system will result. It sounds like a step backward for online auctions right now.

[anallawalla]

Looks like they need laws like the ones that protect ISPs and other carriage service providers in Australia.

[morpheus83]

However Ebay is quiet influential as Condoleeza Rice had appealed to Indian Goverment for his release. The arrest done was for quiet stupid reasons. it was no way in his control to monitor each and every posting.

[victor]

it was no way in his control to monitor each and every posting.

But only because ebay chose to build their software without such controls, and he chose to run that software.

"I was only implementing procedures" should not be a valid defence.

[morpheus83]

But dont you think it is absurd to arrest him for that. While CD's of the same clip were available freely in Delhi.

[grandpa]

But only because ebay chose to build their software without such controls, and he chose to run that software.

How can you control something like this? Say I make a similar video (and I haven't, FWIW) and give it an innocent sounding title. There is simply no way to know what's on the video without watching it, based on the title alone. This would apply to every product sold thru this software.

The only control would be to view every video, listen to every CD, test every piece of software, verify every copyright... an impossibility, IMO. So the logical fallback would be to listen to consumer complaints, and take appropriate action (which I believe happened in this case - the offending product was removed as soon as it became known).