For Real News ....

For any news on Potter books, etc. it's always good to check on J. K. Rowling's official site to see if she's said anything about it (including addressing it as false). There are neat sections on the site where she goes into stuff about characters and all. But I would also recommend checking out some fo the stuff she has said recently there concerning e-bay sales of bogus material. I think her approach is good, to try to encourage individual consumers to pressure E-bay to "beef up security" to make sure people (especially kids) don't get hoodwinked (I also personally think serious Catholics should be busting e-bays chops big-time about the auction of the Eucharist that took place by an e-bay seller) I do think e-bay is, at least to some degree, to be held accountable for providing an "official" sounding avenue for these things (let's face it, for all the statements of "we never said we ensure that, in fact we have put up disclaimers stating we cannot ensure that" - we all know that in this culture, to the minds of a great many consumers, the level of name recognition an entity like e-bay has equals authority and reliability naive people are going to think "it's for auction on e-bay, it must be legit", and un-informed Catholics are probably going to think "the Eucharist for sale on eBay? well, it is e-bay, and I'm sure if it were really that bad they would have some way of finding out and preventing it, so it must be at least allowable or something"). My point (and I think Rowling's, although she would probably put it more pleasantly) is that "Yes ... it's a free market economy ... which also means that consumers have the freedom to bust e-bay's chops on these things, and JK Rowling also has the right to encourage consumers to do so" -When you throw your hat in the public ring and start making as much money as those who run e-bay as an enterprise, you better be able to take being a target of market pressure and be able to respond to it (what we need is the market pressure itself). I would think it perfectly legit (and would love to see it happen) for eBay to have to say "damn ... we better do something about this or the complaint email alone is going to crash our servers" ... the free market system can work for good things happening if good people get behind it and use it well.