Gimme a break! (more ebay madness)
 

Check out this guy:

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1522145122

He's selling a photocopy of the ritual of a non-secret fraternity. Our headquarters has our ritual of initation on their website, and people are paying for photocopies of it? Ughh, give me break.

This is nothing new. Within the past year, there has been a TKE Ritual, Phi Delt Ritual, ATO Ritual, Beta Ritual and a few others. It is a terrible thing, but unfortunately there are people like that out there.

Brian, it just goes to show that these idiots don't realize it's a non-secret fraternity. Too bad these other idiots get to profit off their stupidity.

What confuses me is why would someone WANT a copy of our ritual? Is it some sort of strange power trip or what? This completely boggles my mind and I'm sorry if I'm slow to understand or something...

The ritual is only meaningful to those that experience it in its true form. If you're just reading it out of the book so you can think you're one of the privlidged few -- well that's stupid and pointless.

I'm going to surprise a lot of people here by saying...

Now THIS is wrong! And illegal. I object to the selling of ritual books on ebay, though I know it is not illegal. Selling photocopies of copyrighted material, however, is.

I hope the DUs are pursuing this with ebay. It should be fairly easy to kill the auction since photocopies are very clearly a copyright violation.

Another option is to email all the bidders with the link where they can download themselves a copy of the DU ritual for free.

wptw

I'll probably surprise a lot of people myself by saying...

I completely agree with wptw! :)

One thing to consider -- about e-mailing the bidders, though:

A while back, one of my sisters noticed a Tiffany bracelet on E-bay that had a high reserve. Owning the bracelet herself, she realized that the seller was asking for more money than the piece was worth, so she e-mailed the high bidder and told her that the bracelet could be purchased at Tiffany's website for cheaper than the reserve price on E-bay.

Somehow, the seller found out about the e-mail (we actually think that the seller was acting as the high bidder, trying to drive up the auction), and threatened to sue my sister, stating that she had interfered with an auction by promoting another website that sold the same item -- something that goes against E-Bay's written rules and regulations.

The seller never actually sued, but it's definitely something to think about.

Good point, dzrose.

I have reported "auction tampering" to ebay before. In my case, it was when I was selling a sorority pin and the sisters were emailing the high bidders asking them to retract their bids. Some of the high bidders were collector friends of mine, so it was easy to find out who was doing it. After I got several bid retractions on several different auctions, I started reporting it. First offense is a warning and the second offense gets your ebay account suspended.

But in this case, the seller wouldn't really have any solid ground to stand on anyway, so I say go for it.

wptw

Eh, I figure if someone really wants to get a hold of our ritual so they think they are getting something secret, go ahead and pay the money. It's their own fault for not investigating it further.

I emailed the seller, and he said our headquarters did contact him about it but said that they told him to take it down because they said our ritual is secret. Ummm... yeah, whatever man.