Tuesday 22 April 2008

Furniture 123 Takes a Stand Against Copyright Infringement on eBay

Furniture 123's eBay About Me page

Furniture123.co.uk is the UK's leading online only furniture store. We do not sell furniture on eBay but we do use eBay's VeRO (Verified Rights Owner) programme to protect our intellectual property, including trademarks and copyrights.

We are now taking steps to report all eBay listings, whether these belong to eBay Shops or individual sellers, that infringe our rights.

If your listing has been reported by Furniture 123 it may be for one of, but not restricted to, the following reasons:

- Your eBay listing contained a product description/written content from the furniture123.co.uk website: Most of the brochures we receive from our furniture suppliers do not include any descriptions of the products. When we add these products to our website our team of Merchandisers and Copywriters research the products and write relevant descriptions, the content and format of which are copyrighted. Producing this content is a time consuming task, however we believe it is essential to aiding our customers in the buying process. We will therefore take action against any seller (on eBay or the internet at large) who infringes our copyrights in this way. This is the most common reason for us to report a listing on eBay and it can be avoided by writing your own, original product descriptions at the time of listing your products. Taking just one sentence of copyright material from our website is an infringement and it will be reported.


- Your eBay listing contained a link to the furniture123.co.uk website: As per the example above, you should aim to provide your own original description for furniture you list on eBay, regardless of whether you are a business or an individual. Links to our website will be deemed as unauthorised use of our copyright and will be reported.


- Your eBay listing used the Furniture 123 name: We do not sell our products on eBay and by using our name you may be misleading other users into thinking that we do, or that your listing is in some way affiliated to, or endorsed by, us. The only time it would be acceptable to use our name on your listing is if you are re-selling an item you bought from our official website and you state this in your description.


- Your eBay Shop name or ID infringed our registered company name: Our company name can be written as 'Furniture123' or 'Furniture 123' and this name is registered with Companies House. Any eBay Shop name or ID which is deemed as copying our name and/or its format will be reported. This includes combining the word 'furniture' or any word related to furniture with the number sequence '123'. For example, names such as '123Furniture' or 'Beds123' will be reported. To avoid being reported for this, sellers offering furniture should devise an original name/ID as per the advice above.


Although we aim to report all offending listings, eBay is a big place and some listings get missed. Seeing our copyright material on a live listing does not make it acceptable for others to copy it also. You may not even realise you are using our copyright material as many others have already taken it as their own. In this case ignorance is not a defence and we would urge you to check the ownership of any material before publishing it on your eBay listings or any other websites.

If you wish to use content in your listing and are not sure if it belongs to Furniture 123, we would advise you to do one of two things: write your own, original material OR check our website http://www.furniture123.co.uk/ to see if the text is already used on there.


For further details, please visit our eBay page.

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