As of April 29th, eBay will no longer sell downloadable items:
“We’ll be banning all goods that can be digitally downloaded or transferred electronically from being listed in any format on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ie”
The decision from the multinational online retailer comes from the difficulty of monitoring and upholding the rights of copyright holders for these kind of digital products.
This, coupled with announcements of Rogers bandwidth cap and Bell’s new online traffic restrictions all point to a concerted tightening of the belt around illegal downloading and P2P file sharing.
The bright side? If copyright holders like authors and publishers feel that it’s easier to buy digital content than to steal it, maybe more content goes digital. If more content goes digital, we might start to see consumers finding room for it in places they didn’t previously realize were under-served. And more digital content means it’s easier for Canadian presses and authors to get international attention (without the postage fees)…
