Now, before anyone jumps, I'm talking about people "abusing" not just anyone who posts auctions (empeg in this case) on eBay.

I see a lot of people simply copying (stealing) other people's custom HTML, images and even linking to images on other people's servers (including pulling stuff direct from the SONICblue store site!) That's theft of bandwidth. It's against eBay rules and it's grounds to getting your auction removed.

If you're trying to sell something on eBay, don't steal other people's work and don't link to images that you are not hosting yourself.

If you are following the rules and you see someone else that isn't, just email eBay support about it. It's an easy way to thin out the seller competition. You can also email the rightful owners of the images (webmasters etc) and they may very well change the links.

When I see people stealing from auctions I've listed I fire off an email to the offender asking him to take down his auction right away. The next email goes to eBay. And if I'm in a good mood I may just change over the images they're linking to something else entirely.

If you're one of these thieves and now getting all bent out of shape because you think I'll narc you out... Well, if I feel like it, I will. Get with the program and there's no worries. Good thing I'm not trying to auction an empeg myself right now. Otherwise I'd zip through everyone else's auctions to see how many eBay customer service would care to nuke. It's a rough world on the auction frontier.

Bruno