The court case between eBay and Craigslist is increasingly beginning to seem as if it was scripted by John Grisham. It's the little guy against the big machine.
Craigslist would like us to dedicate all our sympathy to its cause, as it describes its dealings with the big, bad wolf, aka eBay. Or, as Monday's court session heard, the big, bad she-wolf.
Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's CEO, told the court that Garrett Price, an eBay executive, had written him an e-mail that waved a large rainbow-colored warning flag, according to a Reuters story.
"He said he needed to tell me there were two Meg Whitmans," Buckmaster told Craigslist's counsel in court, according to the report. "We had met and reached an agreement with Good Meg. There was another Meg, an Evil Meg. We would be best served to know that Meg could be a monster when she got angry and frustrated."
A monster? That nice lady who, in her run for governor, promises to make California solvent without resorting to punitive taxation or pumping iron? This is surely hard to believe.
The proceedings are being streamed live by the Courtroom View Network, and one wonders just what joy the network might bring Tuesday when eBay's no doubt friendly counsel attempts to hide his fangs from the Craigslist CEO, while simultaneously snipping at his vulnerable parts.
In case you had missed the cause of this kerfuffle, eBay is claiming that Craigslist illegally diluted its 28.4 percent shareholding by "self-dealing," underhand methods.
Craigslist is claiming that eBay made a promise not to start its own Craigslist-type site and then went right ahead and created Kijiji. It seems that such a promise did not appear in what some laypersons might describe as the written form, according to the Associated Press.
Buckmaster also declared that Whitman promised him that if any problems arose between the two companies--an e-mail was produced to the court on Monday in which an eBay executive described Craigslist people as being "definitely on another planet"--then eBay would sell its shares, according to Bloomberg.
"I believed that I could rely on her statements," Buckmaster told the court, Bloomberg said.
Just as Grisham protagonists seem slightly naive to the workings of the world, Buckmaster seems to want the court to believe that Craigslist were nice guys who couldn't imagine how beastly business people could be.
In many Grisham novels, the heroes flee to freedom in some lovely place, with enough money to enjoy the rest of their blissful lives.
Has that thought never crossed the minds of Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark? Just wondering.
In the wake of the murder of Craigslist-advertising masseuse Julissa Brisman, and the arrest of Philip Markoff, Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist gave interviews Friday to Martin Bashir of ABC's Nightline.
Their attitude was both defiant and a little uncomfortable.
Bashir asked Newmark whether he was a law-abiding citizen of America, to which the Craigslist founder said he was "very consistent" about that.
As the interviewer read out a few Craigslist ads and asked him if he thought they were ads for prostitution, Newmark replied: "Probably." He said that if there are ads of a criminal nature on the site, he wants help to get rid of them immediately.
Asked if Craigslist facilitates prostitution, Newmark said: "I wouldn't put it that way, no." Which did seem a little like the answer of a politician.
But when asked about whether, in the light of crime associated with Craigslist, he intended to make any changes to the site, perhaps closing down the Erotic Services section, Newmark leaned heavily on Craigslist's roots.
"The decisions we make on our site are consistently based on feedback from the entirety of the community," he said.
However, he did seem to leave the smallest of crack open for a change of heart: "That feedback changes over time."
Bashir then wondered whether the idea of donating proceeds from the Erotic Services section to charity might seem a little strange.
"Do you think," he asked Buckmaster, "that charities will welcome donations from adverts where people promise to beat each others' backsides till they bleed?"
Buckmaster replied, somewhat nervously: "We'll be making public the donations that are available to charities and they can contact us if they want to take advantage of that."
In this fascinating interview sequence, one could easily conclude that Craigslist wishes that the few in society would just stop behaving in a way that can affect so many so that Craiglist can just carry on with its business.
Unfortunately, the few in society aren't so easily persuaded.
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