From: Steve Grammont (islander@midmaine.com)
Date: Fri Jan 17 2003 - 09:37:05 PST
Hi Paul,
>As far as I know, other nations (not the United States) have extreme
>penalties against buying or selling Nazi memorabilia (or I suppose being a
>party to such a sale). eBay can't fight the laws there, nor can they
>readily keep people from specific nations from accessing eBay. So, they
>cave in by prohibiting them.
It is true that some other nations, Germany and Israel for example, have
pretty strict rules about Nazi symbols, slogans, and even written
materials. The thing is that those laws do NOT apply to a US based
company. Period. If someone from one of those countries orders
something illegal (in their country) from the US, the transaction would
be legal in the US and illegal in the country where the item was
received. The only party legally responsible would be the person doing
the order, not the place doing the shipping.
Also, there is a German version of eBay which caters to the German
market. Since I belive it is located in Germany, they would obviously be
breaking the law to have illegal items up for sale on the GERMAN website.
The website itself would be illegal.
I have quite a bit of first hand experience with the German laws.
>I don't mean to defend eBay, but in this case, from a legal and technical
>perspective, allowing trading of guns or nazi stuff would put their
>business at great peril. I'm sure politics plays into it, as well.
Unfortunately, it is all politics. If the Koreans and Chinese had a
lobby equal to that of the Jewish community, there would be no Japanese
WWII items on eBay either. And if any significant group of people in the
West cared about Slavs... nothing Soviet of any era would be allowed.
True for all sorts of other regimes, such as Pol Pot's wonderful time in
power, etc.
As someone else pointed out, eBay's rules are arbitrary and without any
merrit. And they are a perfect example of why censorship is such a bad
idea, even when it is intended to be "for the better".
>I think of it as a "dumbing down" effect - meet the lowest common
>denominator of the common nations that scare eBay lawyers the most.
It isn't that the lawyers are scared, it is that their corporate execs
are scared of being branded "pro-Nazi", "anti-semetic", or some other
such nonsense.
>I wonder, though, how much water this line of reasoning holds, as someone
>just noted about the Japanese items being sold (dunno if Japan restricts
>sale/buying of Japanese war memorabilia).
Japan has sadly not come to grips with its past, so I doubt this very
much. Unlike Germans, the average Japanese citizen doesn't know the
truth of what their forefathers did. For some reason only
de-Nazification was high up on the Allies agenda. The Japanese were
allowed to shuffle their crimes under the carpet.
Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Apr 23 2003 - 13:25:00 PDT