> Besides, Ebay seems to shoot itself in the foot, since it often features
> product information that is either verbatim copied off manufacturers'
> sites, or contains direct links to those sites. Under this ruling, such
> practices are illegal.
Just to clarify what you write here, it's the individual sellers on eBay who are on occassion using product info from manufacturer sites when they post their items (and why not?) for the kinds of items that would lend themselves to such tactics, not eBay themselves. People have an odd habit of saying, "eBay's trying to sell someone's kidney" when in fact it's some guy in California or wherever who posted it for sale.
Since I make a living selling historical ephemera on eBay, I have to do all my own scanning, etc., but I can appreciate the convenience for someone who's selling commercially-available items - like, if you were selling a cell phone, why not paste in a full-color JPEG of the specs on the phone from the Sprint PCS website? Of course, to a degree eBay would be legally construed as condoning such things - but eBay in itself is more like a great sprawling flea market, and if someone tears an advert out of a magazine and pins it to their stall to show what they have on offer, who's going to argue? (Someone will, no doubt, in time...) It's all so ephemeral, with tens of thousands of sellers and literally millions of items changing hands each day.
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/ dave /