Congrats eBay Inc. You Beat Up the Little Guy

eBay is a sleazy company. Period. That fact gets more evident each and every day. Yesterday that fact was plastered across the headlines as eBay won its "trademark dilution" suit against www.perfumebay.com. I'll try to keep this short and sweet, as my head is near the point of exploding each and every time I think about eBay. Basically, the lawsuit said that eBay was worried that Perfumebay.com sounded too much like eBay.com. Honestly, I don't know how Perfumebay pronounces their name, but it looks to me like it would be pronounced Perfume Bay. Anyway, eBay was worried that shoppers might think they were on an official eBay site while on Perfumebay.com. Given the track record of hackings, scams, fraud and general stupidity, Perfumebay probably wouldn't want their customers to think they were on eBay.

And one look at the site (go ahead, take a look, buy some Christmas presents - www.perfumebay.com) and it is obvious that it ain't no eBay. It's a nice clean looking site, simple in design and seemingly easy to navigate. It also appears to be a Yahoo! store. If eBay plans on taking everyone down that has the letters e-b-a-y in sequence in their names, who will be next? Type in any common word ending in "e" in your address bar of your browser, then add a "bay.com" to it. Most likely you'll find a website, possibly even an ecommerce store. Whatever the intentions of those sites for using "bay" at the end of their web addresses, it does not make it any better for eBay's PR to try to put them out of business.

This lawsuit is sort of like an elementary school bully beating up a retarded kid in a wheelchair using a tire iron. Yeah, the bully showed the handicapped kid who's boss, but so what, the bully just looks like a douchebag. ...and everyone who feels sorry for the kid in the wheelchair will probably show him some attention.

By the way, Perfumebay.com also owns the sites www.perfume-bay.com, www.scentguru.com and www.beautifulperfumes.com. Next time you need perfume, I suggest not checking eBay, but rather visit one of these stores and send eBay a message.

The stupidity of the ruling is not limited to the judge in this case. Heck, Pierre Omidyar stole his name from Echo Bay in the beginning. No, he wasn't trying to pretend that his company was Echo Bay, but it isn't like he came up with anything original to begin with. Also, more stupid, is the fact that eBay is still using BIN code that was nothing-short-of-stolen from MercExchange, and eBay has basically admitted that it is using stolen code when they paid MercExchange off the first time. But having to pay millions of dollars in fines was not enough to get eBay to stop using MercExchange's patented technology, no, eBay keeps right on using it, despite claims that they have came up with their own code that does not violate anyone's patents. What sense does that make? Finally, the utter stupidity of Meg Whitman & Co. to be bothering with these petty lawsuits is staggering. Hey Meg, there are problems with eBay and eBay's revenue stream, and sites like this aren't even in the top ten.