eBay Fakes Devalue the Craft of Tomb Robbing 153
James McP writes "According to an article on Archaeology, fake artifacts being sold on eBay have caused the bottom to drop out of the low-end artifact market. This outcome is exactly opposite to what archeologists feared would happen when eBay came on the scene. A side effect of more and more forgers getting in on the act has been a dramatic increase in high-quality fakes that can fool experts and illicit collectors alike, lowering the price for high-end artifacts as well. It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
Laura Croft: Ebay Raider (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, who could have ever thought new technology could have beneficial side effects? That's just crazy.
I'm glad to see this get press. Maybe some people will think twice about jumping on the alarmist "Must Fear Everything New" bandwagon.
Then again, it double's their potential for attention-whoredom: make news talking up your baseless dire predictions, then make news with the shocking revelation that, not only did your predicts not come true, the opposite happened! Who could have seen this amazing twist ending!
Weird anyway. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not Illegal But Definitely Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
"100% Authentic" is a classic example of a common advertising dodge. It's not a sentence, it's a meaningless fragment without an object, subject, or a verb. The implication is that you're saying that the object right there on the same page is 100% authentic, but they're not responsible for your misunderstanding.
This is a particularly good example, because the sentence not only lacks an object, it also lacks the object that is supposed to be related to the object by the descriptor "authentic". Not only do we not know what is supposed to be authentic, but we don't what class of thing it's supposed supposed to be an authentic member of!
So (unknown object) (is a) 100% Authentic (unknown thing). A perfectly meaningless sentence fragment. Caveat Emptor.
Re:Not Illegal But Definitely Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
it's a 100% Authentic......reproduction
Re:Not Illegal But Definitely Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disagree in part! (Score:4, Insightful)
What about authentic fakes?
Re:Not Illegal But Definitely Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Except of course for all the paintings not discovered to be by someone considered important until years, decades, or centuries after the work was created. Something that's actually done fairly routinely.
Re:Not Illegal But Definitely Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly -- forget ebay hawkers, allegedly legitimate big corporations use nonsense statements like "100% Natural" all the time.
Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Which they don't (Score:4, Insightful)
They are very careful to avoid actually saying that the items are artifacts.
Anyway, what are you going to do, tell the police you bought an item you thought was illegal and it turned out it wasn't? Go ahead, cops deserve a laugh now and then. I am sure they will drop all the murder and rape cases and jump right on top of it. Just like cops jump on copy right infringement (note that the police doesn't, only prosecutors looking for a lucrative job after their public service).
Re:Not Illegal But Definitely Misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
First it is considered a fake.
Then all the experts argue about why it isn't.
Then some people may believe it is real.
Re:Numismats (Score:1, Insightful)
They even guarantee them against several types of scientific tests (including fluorescence and mass spectrography) ! I have no idea how they can do that
They're criminals. They can say they guarantee anything. Maybe the coins actually fail these tests, but once you've purchased it, what do they care?
Re:Not Illegal But Definitely Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
"Fraud - (Law) An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of obtaining some valuable thing or promise from another"
To argue that it's a meaningless fragment somehow abdicates the seller from responsibility is absurd. English is a context-sensitive language. Read the description again:
Pre-columbian is a time period. Authentic, in this context, means minimally that the object was constructed as described at or before that time period. If the seller had said, "0% Guaranteed", then perhaps there'd be some leeway to the point that the seller is unsure of what he's selling. So, it if turns out that said mask isn't really pre-columbian, it's very clear that a perversion of the truth is occured, that the seller was entirely irresponsible to call it 100% guaranteed authentic, that such actions indicate an intention to defraud, and they should prosecuted for fraud*. And if it is pre-columbina, nothing should happen.
Your argument seems about as aburd as the idea that adding random periods in your sentences in contracts would magically abdicate both parties from responsibility within that contract. It is the "meeting of the minds" in contract and in contract-like situation (ie, interactions where there are socially-constructed and lawfully enforced transactions) that determines what, if any, remedy is available to parties for any failures to comply with the intention of the "contract". The only thing sellers of fake artifacts have going for them is, because their "meeting of the minds" is partially implicit, they have more leeway to argue that their intentions were honest.
Language like "100% guaranteed" is clearly to designed as a means of conveying that a seller is forgoing various defenses should a complaint arise as they themselves have taken on the responsibility of claiming to actually know the truth and to be held accountable for that truth. If such language is infact meaningless, then the use of such language is clearly designed to try to fool people to trust and buy products they wouldn't otherwise by envoking the previous sentence's implications. It is little different than using a trademark one does not have a right/privilege to. All are attempts to manipulate money out of people without exchanging with them something of value.
*Just because a person should be prosecuted for fraud doesn't mean they likely will. This would appear to be especially true over the internet, but I believe the truth is more that people in general have such low standards of expectations regardless of what is clearly promised that they don't pursue legal action against those that defraud them. Not wanting to be "overly litigious", a desire to not appear foolish for having believed another person's promises, courts generally already being rather busy, "Caveat Emptor", and the possibility of not being able to recoup one's losses anyways for "failing to follow common sense" all are barriers to remeding fraud.
Not just artifacts. (Score:5, Insightful)
The same has occured with the trade of endangered plant species to an extent.
The illegal trade of endangered flora has let to the destruction or near destruction of many species. Ebay sales have allowed people to trade plants that were grown in private collections rather than habitat and due to the risk of illegal habitat smuggling of plants, people growing them in cultivation can undercut those selling plants taken illegally from habitat.
This has allowed some highly endangered species to recover as the pressure from illegal smuggling has died away due to it not being worth the time for smugglers when mass growing at plant nurseries means they can be undercut to the point it's not even worth the smugglers driving to the habitat, let alone risking doing the smuggling itself.
Ironically though, the international process designed to help protect endangered species - CITES - actually hampers this because it prevents international trade of endangered plants even if they were grown purely in private collections and never grown in habitat, whilst smugglers ignore such regulations anyway.
As with this and as with artifacts there's a lot to be said about free trade of fakes, or in this case - privately and responsibly grown plants rather than restriction of it. It allows market forces to undercut costs of authentic specimens to the point where it's simply not worth smuggling from a monetary point of view. If more was done to support the trade of "fakes" rather than hamper it as per CITES I think decline of smuggling would actually help - it's better to prevent smuggling at the source and protect habitat than it is to try and catch it at the ports because again, smugglers will avoid the ports anyway.
Re:Direct Modern Analog: Cracking DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
More accurately, and more abstractly, it's cracking the DRM on matter.
Once you can replicate something perfectly right down to the molecular level, there is no longer any difference between the original and the duplicate, because there's
Sure you could say that you know, because you made the replica, but if I take both pieces, hold them behind my back for a moment, shifting my arms, you've lost that.certainty too.
Personally, I love seeing scarce goods copied perfectly and can't wait for this to happen to more things.
The diamond industry comes to mind. DeBeers has been trying desperately to convince everyone that "diamonds are valuable", and now that we're getting good at making copies, they're changing their tune to be, "natural diamonds are valuable". Which basically just proves them to be shysters all along. There was really nothing special about them before, and there's even less now, but they're trying desperately to cling to their business model of convincing people that something is valuable, then holding monopolistic stockpiles of it and releasing just a trickle.
Re:Numismats (Score:2, Insightful)
What really bothers me about all this though is ... that these people are destroying the world's history to turn some quick money now
I have to ask - how are they destroying the world's history? If they're producing such good fakes that even curators are being fooled into thinking that they're genuine, doesn't that mean there's more culture going around?
As a simple example, if I created a near-perfect forgery of the Mona Lisa, such that a curator couldn't tell it from the original, then we'd have two Mona Lisa's floating around to be hung up in museums. How does this damage the world's history and culture? It's no longer as rare, so more people have access to it.
Maybe the individual who owned the original might be a little miffed at the dramatic fall in value of his painting since no one would know which one was real, but isn't that a little bit selfish in terms of the entire world sharing in a culture?
Re:Numismats (Score:3, Insightful)
Suppose you had to use another piece of art from the same period as the Mona Lisa to create your fake. Yes there would be another Mona Lisa to show off, but the piece you used would be destroyed forever.
They SHOULD be easy to reproduce. (Score:3, Insightful)
They SHOULD be easy to reproduce. Almost all of truely antique pots and so on were made hundreds of years ago be just "normal indians" It is not like most of them were in their time "high art" it was jsut the vilage potter's work and likely sold for a small amount. The potter made these from local cheap materials that are still locally available and cheap,. Basically any skilled potter who knows what to do can turn out many pots per day both now and 500 years ago.
This is not the same thing as a fake Rembrandt oil painting. 1,000 years ago these pots were made by people of avgerage skills.