Re: [Flightgear-devel] Fwd: Flight Gear being sold on ebay

[Reagan T. <re...@ce...>]

They're not the only ones selling FlighGear on ebay. But others I've 
seen, while misleading, at least showed graphics including the 
FlightGear name and logo in the body of their auction. It looks like 
these guys are also trying to borrow on the name "Pro Flight" (a maybe 
dead product from Sierra Online?) to hook the naive.

I've tried to battle this kind of thing (people selling freely available 
DIY plans written by friends of mine) in the past to some small effect. 
But that was only one person protesting; maybe with enough complainants 
it might be noticed.

The method I used was to bring the message to the fraudster's target 
audience by offering the same product on ebay using the same keywords, 
but making it very clear in the body of the auction [1] the true nature 
of the product (and where one can get it for free) and [2] the true 
nature of the fraudulent auctions.  I think the scenery DVDs that are 
available at the FlightGear web site might be a good product to pitch in 
this case. I found this method to work, but with a serious drawback: it 
takes a longterm commitment by the person(s) hawking the "official" 
auctions to remain effective. Perhaps just one official auction per 
month would suffice.

Curtis Olson wrote:
> See attached forwarded message.  Someone is selling FlightGear on ebay.  
> This time there is no mention of our project name, they have changed the 
> name and are calling it "Pro Aircraft Flight Simulator".  In addition, 
> they are using the same sleazy tactics of selling a digital download, 
> not actual media ... for all I know, they tell their suckers/customers 
> to go download it from our own server after the buyer pays the money.
> 
> I don't know if we can keep the grass clear of all the weeds here, but I 
> wonder if we have a large volume of people report this fraudulent ad to 
> ebay, if they might do something.  Ebay is heavily slanted towards 
> sellers rights, so I think we would need a pretty big ground swell here 
> to get their attention.
> 
> Perhaps a little "question for the seller" message wouldn't hurt either 
> ... but I would caution that we need to be professional, honest, and 
> fair in our dealings here.  We can't stoop down to this persons level, 
> we can't make unfounded claims, we can't make stupid threats, or it just 
> turns into a WWF match and no one can win.
> 
> Curt.
> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Jun 14, 2007 8:30 AM
> Subject: Flight Gear being sold on ebay
> 
> Curt,
> 
> 
> Noticed someone selling what sure looks like Flight Gear on Ebay – not 
> calling it Flight Gear of course…thought you'd be interested, hopefully 
> you can shut the clown down. Here's a link to one of the auctions:
> 
> http://cgi.ebay.com/PRO-Aircraft-Flight-Sim-Simulator-Bonus-Planes_W0QQitemZ300120813715QQihZ020QQcategoryZ80336QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem
> 
> 
> If that link doesn't work, it's item# 300120813715
> 
>  
> 
> 
> -- 
> Curtis Olson - University of Minnesota - FlightGear Project
> http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/  http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/  http://www.flightgear.org
> Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
> 
> 
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-- 
Reagan Thomas
CEAT Labs
323 Engineering North
Oklahoma State University
(405) 744-5735