The situation I described in yesterday's story (see "Embroidering on a Copyright Shakedown Theme") raises many troubling questions - questions I must admit I don't have definitive answers for yet. But in looking for answers, I found myself asking yet one more question: what duty of privacy does eBay and its PayPal subsidiary owe customers purchasing goods via their services?
As near as I can tell, the ESPC letters had their origins a little over a year ago when the group settled a lawsuit it had filed against eBay. The ESPC, which then as now seemed to consist mostly of embroidery design house Great Notions and its business partners, had accused eBay of being complicit in illegal sales of copyrighted designs. Terms of the settlement were not announced, but an ESPC legal spokesman at the time made it clear he thought it would enable them to go after the buyers as well as sellers.
By the way, I have no doubt that the embroidery design piracy problem is a serious one. And not all buyers who purchased a suspect CD on eBay did so in complete innocence. Some of the letter recipients that I've heard from - particularly those who got their first letter many months ago - acknowledge they paid a couple dollars for a disk claiming to have thousands of designs and so knew all along it was probably a bootleg copy. But there are also many well-respected independent "digitizers" - people who make embroidery machine designs of their own - who sell CD collections on the Internet at prices similar to the ones we discussed yesterday.
In all likelihood, the ESPC letters would not have received any attention outside sewing circles if it hadn't for lawsuits Great Notions brought against two Missouri women accused of selling, not buying, products that infringe Great Notions copyrights. Originally filed in Texas last year, the lawsuits were re-filed in Missouri this year. And for good measure, the ESPC filed a defamation suit against the two women over a Yahoo group it said they were running. In conjunction with those lawsuits, Greats Notions and ESPC's attorney issued subpoenas to eBay and PayPal for their records on the defendants' sales and to Yahoo for all information on anyone who'd posted in the Yahoo group.
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