eBay policy?


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Not sure if this is the right forum to post in, but I'll try anyway.

In a bunch of eBay software auctions, I see this:

To comply with Microsoft and Ebay policy, a piece of computer hardware will be included with the software. This hardware can be motherboard, hard drive, video card, memory card, sound card, CPU, IDE cable, fan etc. The sales terms of this randomly selected untested hardware is "as - is" and is not returnable. There is no warranty, either expressed or implied, on the hardware piece included and, as such, is non returnable and non refundable.

However, in many other auctions of the same piece of software, no such hardware is included. I scanned through the terms of eBay and I didn't see anything like this. Could some eBay guru shed some light on this? If I wanted to sell a piece of software, do I need to put in a mic or something into the package to make it legal? I would think that only OEM software should have such restrictions, but many OEM XP's are selling w/o hardware, and they aren't closed down.

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:laugh: OEM software is intended to be sold with a computer system. It means if you are selling any Original Equipment Manufacturer software, you are supposed to include a piece of hardware, to make it 'legal'. But OEM software is sold all the time by itself. I do not know how E-bay could enforce the OEM rule. :huh:

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It's OEM software adhering to simultaneous hardware sale legal requirements.

EBay doesn't have the resources (or true responsibility) to shut down / handle a lot of stuff without actual complaints being made unless they notice things flagrant. For better or worse, there's a lot of legal responsibility that falls on seller to a point.

If a place like Microsoft or whoever starts filing a lot of complaints, they might have to do something. In the meantime, someone selling OEM software may have indeed purchased it themselves initially with hardware, and are now just legally (?) selling the software.

Whether or not someone themselves *has* to sell OEM software along with hardware would depend primarily on how they obtained the software themselves in the first place, I'd believe.

If you yourself would have a hardware sale requirement along with software you'd sell would depend on how you got the software. If you're getting the OEM software from MS and are reselling, you need to meet their legal requirements. Under "normal" circumstances of selling software, you mainly need to adhere to requirements like it being original, in-box, not still installed on another machine, etc.

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NewEgg.com requires a hardware purchase with any OEM Microsoft software it sells. The hardware can be as cheap as a $2 cable, and they will often refund the price of the cable.

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