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PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

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Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#281

Post by dangrossman »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #275
joshz wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It now appears that the seller did get the violin authenticated. From a brief search, it looks like eBay had to pay large sums multiple times for selling counterfeit goods. $2500 violin, as sad as it is, is small fries. It seems that it's cheaper to operate under the assumption that if there's a suspicion an item is counterfeit, then that's more likely than not. Even if they messed up and lose a lawsuit from a seller…

>" eBay had to pay large sums multiple times for selling counterfeit goods " I thought ebay provided a marketplace, I didn't realise they also sold goods?

Contributory infringement is a real thing in the US. You can be liable for providing the means.

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#282

Post by muraiki »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #276
anigbrowl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're wrong. Nobody is forcing you to use Paypal, you accept payment that way because it's convenient for both buyer and seller. You could advertise on Craigslist, but would you feel comfortable if someone says, 'I will send you a check, please ship to this address'? No, because the check may be bad and you could have a big financial headache. Likewise, many buyers would not be comfortable sending a check or tak…

Well, your post pretty much embodies everything that is wrong with the world these days. "Cost of doing business"? ROTFL, I'm just a dude selling a handful of trinkets and baubles on eBay, once in a blue moon. Your argument is like one of those math "proofs" that make sense internally, but are stemming from axioms utterly divorced from reality. You could "demonstrate" anything that way. You could even "demonstrate" h…

Start your own competing service then. Seriously. Then you'll understand why things are the way anigbrowl explains. The one "divorced from reality" is you. There is significant cost associated with PayPal's operation. Their management of all this risk is what earns them their profits.

PayPal provides a service and you are getting benefits from it at a relatively low cost. They are taking risk on from you selling stuff that is making them very little money (trinkets and baubles, as you described).

I'm not saying PayPal are a bunch of saints, or that they don't have some policies which aren't right. As a musician, I find the situation described in the article to be abhorrent, and it's behavior like this that prevents me from using PayPal except as a last resort. But what you are saying basically boils down a temper tantrum about how things should be different. Well, if you have an idea as to how to do this in a way that doesn't bankrupt you, there's your entrepreneurial opportunity. Go change the world.

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#283

Post by andrewcooke »

StavrosK wrote: post #231
yoos wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, trying to compare two violins with recorded clips like the ones in that blog post is pointless because there are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone. I'm not sure whether or not to be surprised by the test results. I wonder what kind of credentials these "professionals" have? Even the best violinists probably have tried only a few of the many Strads and Guarneris in existence…

> there are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone. Is that true? Shannon-Nyquist seems to disagree.

after reading the other responses, my guess is that there could be something to this if the ear's response is non-linear in some way that makes non-audible frequencies affect audible ones.

that might sound crazy, so let me give an example. cheap active speakers (the kind you plug into a computer) will often pick up radio transmissions from passing emergency vehicles. the speaker cable acts like an antenna and picks up the radio signal. now the radio signal is, of course, at radio frequencies, but there's some non-linearity in the amp that results in an audio signal (an understandable one) coming out of the speaker.

that's a fairly extreme example, but here's another more biologically believable one. perhaps there are frequencies which are high enough to be inaudible, but which influence the ear in how it responds to audible frequencies. for example, perhaps the ultra-high frequency signal stimulates the ear in some way that makes it more sensitive to audible higher frequencies. then you would hear a brighter tonal balance when listening live than when listening to a band-limited recording.

i am not saying this must happen; i am saying this may be the (physically reasonable) basis for some belief / rumour / knowledge in the audio business.

[also, note that the non-linearity must be in the ear; if it's in the surroundings then the mic will pick it up too. and it must be influenced by frequencies that are outside the recording bandwidth otherwise you'd hear it on playback.]

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#284

Post by st0p »

Dove wrote: post #259
AnthonBerg wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we were as compassionate towards, say, starving people.

Puzzling. Do you think people would be less irate if, instead of a violin destroyed, it had been a starving person?

[dystopia]Imagine a starving person from Ethopia being sold on ebay and then destroyed because the buyer said the bought good actually had the Somalian nationality[/dystopia]

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#286

Post by waqf »

sporkologist wrote: post #181
UK-Al05 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put that you own the customers soul in a tos or other ridiculous claims, but It will never upheld. This won't hold up in court.

caught -> court: oddest typo I've seen yet

For most Britons the two words are homophonous, which makes it a great deal less odd.

(Americans also make typos which look odd to Britons, for example "mute point".)

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#287

Post by jpitz »

yoos wrote: post #280
jpitz wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone. I am confused. I think you're claiming that, for example, a KSM-137 has frequency response in some part of the audible range that is so terrible that there are sounds it just flat out isn't capturing. What frequencies?

I admit I made an assumption when I said microphones can't capture certain sounds. I should instead have said: There are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone and accurately play back with average computer speakers , at least in my experience. Whether the loss in quality is the microphone's fault or the speakers' fault, I don't know. Regardless, there are sounds the musician hears an…

This, I can buy. More so even lossy codecs over crappy speakers.

I am wary of the argument that there exists this great gap between average listeners and trained musicians. There is a training gap, surely, but IMHO the raw auditory discrimination capacity just isn't all that different. I'm just a dumb brass player, but trumpets all sounds very, VERY distinct from one another to me, generally. I attribute that to practice, not acuity.

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#288

Post by StavrosK »

JonnieCache wrote: post #238
StavrosK wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone. Is that true? Shannon-Nyquist seems to disagree.

In short, ultrasonic frequencies will interact with each other in the room (reflections, reverb and so on) in a way that causes interference in the frequency range you can hear. This is why it is important to record instruments with higher sample rates (192khz is standard) in order to fully preserve their sonic character for further processing. This is one answer to the question "why do musicians record ultrasound,"…

I see, thank you. I'm not entirely convinced, but it sounds plausible enough. I'm no expert, though.

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#289

Post by yoos »

jpitz wrote: post #287
yoos wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit I made an assumption when I said microphones can't capture certain sounds. I should instead have said: There are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone and accurately play back with average computer speakers , at least in my experience. Whether the loss in quality is the microphone's fault or the speakers' fault, I don't know. Regardless, there are sounds the musician hears an…

This, I can buy. More so even lossy codecs over crappy speakers. I am wary of the argument that there exists this great gap between average listeners and trained musicians. There is a training gap, surely, but IMHO the raw auditory discrimination capacity just isn't all that different. I'm just a dumb brass player, but trumpets all sounds very, VERY distinct from one another to me, generally. I attribute that to prac…

Hmm.. I'm not entirely sure if by the "gap", you were referring to this, but just to clarify:

When I said there are sounds the musician hears and feels the audience cannot, I wasn't referring to the ability to pick out different sounds, but rather the physical impossibility of certain sounds (e.g., higher-frequency overtones, squeaking strings, rasping strings) to be heard beyond a certain distance away from the instrument being played.

To go off on even more of a tangent, I sometimes feel bad that not enough people get a chance to listen to musical performances up close. I mean really close, with the musician in front of them in the same room so they can hear "almost" everything.

"Almost" because, at least for violins, you can't hear or feel everything until you actually play the instrument (can any violinist here vouch for this?). This is especially so because the chinrest transfers some of the vibrations to the ear through the bone, and there are sounds made by the bow and strings that only the person playing can hear simply because they are too quiet, and that only during quiet pieces, etc.

I've never played a Strad, nor do I have much experience, but I wonder if nearly irrelevant details such as these are a part of what sets the best instruments apart from the rest?

Re: PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

#290

Post by JumpCrisscross »

wcoenen wrote: post #204
tokenadult wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We seriously need a viable competitor to the paypal/ebay system yesterday. That may be, and I make extremely little use of PayPal (only as a processor of credit card payments for merchants I trust on other grounds, and never as a seller of goods). But any new viable competitor to PayPal will have to solve all over all the cases of fraud and abuse that were responded to over the years by PayPal's current policies. "Th…

I think that the problem is exactly that paypal and credit cards try to solve the trust issue, but they do it in a simplistic way that heavily favors the buyer. Let payments be payments like cash, and solve trust issues separately with things like escrow services.

It seems like this rule is designed to benefit not the buyer but an extra-transactional party, namely, the IP owner - that is usually the case in anti-counterfeit programmes. The case of the violin is just a perversion of a rule that was probably implemented to prevent the sale of fake watches, handbags, and the like.
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