"NO, that's not allowed," he said. Ebay has a "report item" button, and for an item like this, you are supposed to report that it is ADULT...NOT ALLOWED AT ALL.
EXCEPT...eBay's various "Report Item" employees, who seem to be in the Far East mostly...India, Guam, Pakistan....are "overworked" and perhaps undertrained. So this item, which has been reported for the past FOUR MONTHS, has never been removed.
"I see...this seller..." has been suspended. Has had another alias suspended. Has been reported to the VeRO (verified rights owner ) department of eBay dozens of times. Has been BANNED from using PAYPAL.
But the Sharapova picture has yet to be removed and the seller has hundreds more. "Eugene" said he would forward this problem. That was a few weeks ago. Forward it to WHERE?
"Eugene" had no answer for that. Like all the people who answer phones at eBay, he just...answers phones.
As to eBay item number: 383122463020 - the fake Sharapova picture, well, it WOULD be removed if Sharapova had a rep who was aware of the problem and wanted to take three minutes to cut and paste the auction number onto an email form.
Meanwhile...even as eBay and its sellers make money off fake nudes, invasion-of-privacy images, nude "housewife" and "amateur" photos with NO model release of age or consent, and nude images of celebrities stolen out of frames of movies ("screen captures"), here's the world of DEEP FAKES on the INTERNET:
There's a law now in California against DEEP FAKES. There are Federal Laws stating that pornographers MUST have signed model release of age and consent.
Who is enforcing these laws? Who is shutting down celebrity "JIHAD" and 4-Chan sites that chortle over their fake nudes, don't bother to say which images might be real, or why they are invading any woman's privacy with this junk.
It took two years for a chid pornography website to be shut down and its owner prosecuted. Really?
At the moment on a typical site, Taylor Swift (or rather, her head) is singing "Look What You Made Me Do" to what DEEPFAKE artists have made her do: hardcore porn. You'd think the powerful Ms. Swift would have a legal team able to take down the website on the simple grounds of unauthorized use of her song. It hasn't happened yet. Perhaps a reason is that the website is run by some crumb in Croatia, and the Ambassador to Croatia is too busy Tweeting about a lunch he ate? (Check the Ambassador of Croatia's Twitter feed and see what a complete waste of space this bald fat asshole is).
Google which claims to fight deepfakes, actually does its best to preserve them, and every other copyright abuse and trademark abuse and rape of intellectual property. They ignore DMCA's. They have no phone number. They have templates that make it impossible to send anything in, and if one does, it comes bouncing back: "Form was not filled out correctly." With no information on what went wrong. That's GOOGLE.
What can be done? The people elected to serve us need to ignore the lobbying of Google, and the bullying of Wikipedia and the raging of Bezos' Amazon and the arm-twisting of eBay and pass more laws to hold websites accountable and to have ICE or other agencies take over these sites and knock them offline.
As for eBay, the quickest and most efficient way to get action is through the VeRO program. Prominent women need to appoint somebody (it doesn't have to be a lawyer) to be a VeRO rep and take the few minutes needed to send in a DMCA.
Unfortunately, this is still not going to prevent the AVERAGE WOMAN from being a victim of revenge porn, or of having her pictures stolen off her computer and sold via print-out on eBay. Should every woman who ever posed nude for a boyfriend or husband be checking EVERY eBay seller in the sneaky "ADULT" section of the site to see if their photos are for sale? NO.
Ebay should disallow any non-professional images, and sales from jerks who are running pictures through computer printers and have no signed model release. ALL eBay sellers should be selling material professionally made by willing participants, and not "found" images or "housewife" or "amateur" material that looks (and usually is) stolen off websites or scanned from magazines.
