Interesting blip on the radar ...

Today's NYT ran this interesting blip: Battle Over Stolen Goods Sold Online Goes to Washington. It's all about the 'E-fencing act of 2008', aka HR 6713

"The bills, proposed and backed by bricks-and-mortar retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Target, would require that online marketplaces like eBay and Overstock.com promptly investigate and pull down listings when retailers provide “credible evidence” that merchandise is stolen. The bills also make it a felony to sell stolen items online and give retailers new rights to sue Internet companies in federal court if they fail to respond or promptly take down stolen merchandise from their sites. "

As the article and comments point out, this bill is more geared towards people selling stolen and knockoff goods (Think: watches, DVD's and handbags) -- but it got me thinking about the stolen bike problem.

What pisses me off here is that it's a) retailer-centric and b) goes after the online services, instead of the actual damn thieves. We constantly find people on Ebay and Craigslist selling stolen bikes and bike gear - and we see about zero help from either one. Ebay's turned into a #$^%ing cesspool - at this point I could start an account selling stolen human livers and it'd probably take them three weeks and five transactionsbefore they shut my account down. From what I've seen and heard from SBR users, a lot of small-time stuff is now flying under the radar.

And Craigslist, for as touchy-feely of a reputation as it has had in the past, has gone off the rails with respect to black- and grey-market sales. In the ultimate of d*ck moves, at one point they even threatened another anti-bike-theft site I've spoke to with legal action -- for caching Craigslist pages. Do you hear me, Craig? Not. Cool.

What hurts here is that even the most basic authentication and verification controls would stop a lot of what's killing both of these services. And yet they resist. Best of luck to the many competitors popping up that seek to beat them at their own game by tackling this kind of thing. Right now Im' still convinced that the best hope in the fight against bike theft still lies with community-driven services like the SBR and the excellent finetoothcog.com