EBay's Policy on Image and Text Theft

Did this other seller originally have an image of his/her own and
decided they liked yours better and swapped or added yours? Or did
they not have any image at all?

If my memory serves, anything after the first image gets charged, so
they can trace EXACTLY when the other seller included your picture and
the time would be LATER than when you posted yours.

I'm surprised they would be so lax about this. Do they really want
sellers portraying merchandise that may not be in the condition it's
shown to be???

I would keep on this. There is no excuse for someone to get away with
using your image to sell their item, esp. when your item may not be
anything like yours.

Kristine,
What I am going to suggest will not help your current situation but it
might help moving forward.
When taking digital pictures set the camera to document the date/time
the pic was taken as well as in one of the bottom corners of the
subject matter
diplay your business card or some other indentifier specific to you.
One would think this would cover your bases and establish you as the
originator of that image.
BillR.

"We're just a venue" is the usual mantra, even when people are caught
doing blatantly illegal things. Copyright violations usually only get
an auction pulled if the complainant is a major corporation like
Disney. They frankly couldn't care less about anyone else.

I was the victim of a Chinese seller of pirated Baby Einstein (aka
Disney) DVDs - who had hijacked a US account to do his selling from.
Ebay TKOed the auction, but only after I'd already paid. It took
months and two certified letters to my credit card company to get my
money back. Paypal is supposed to give refunds for cases like this,
but since they're part of Ebay they refused.

I'm not primarily a buyer. I'm a seller with over 900 transactions
and 100% positive feedback. I post at least 10 listings on Ebay every
single week. But, if I ever ran into this problem I expect the same
response as the letter writer.

...even though it's off topic of what I said.

I find it hard to believe they would approve of someone copying your
picture and adding it to either an existing or a new auction. I would
follow Jeffrey's advice exactly (change the wording). Make sure to
include your auction number, which I'm sure you did the first time.
Good luck.

Looks like you were the victim of someone that didn't have enough time
to actually research your complaint.

They checked when the auctions started and made a decision based on
that. Not on when the photo was added.

eBay, like many companies, makes a limited number of CSRs deal with so
many e-mails in a day that the CSR has to rush through them.

I find that writing another message, but rearranging my words, usually
does the trick. For example, make sure the phrase "the
copyright-infringing photo was added to listing XYZ on MM/DD/YYYY, 8
days after I posted the same picture" appears at the top of your
message.

Good luck.

I hope that this wasn't a case where you were actually harmed.

I had this happen to me about a month ago. I had already sold a phone
on ebay and I just happen to be looking thru the listings on that
certain phone model.

Someone had duplicated my entire entry, down to the text and pictures!
When I confronted the person, they acted like they didn't know what I
was talking about and were getting rude in their emails.

I reported their auction with a link to mine and the next day their
auction was deleted.

Good luck on getting this taken care of. I know how you feel when
someone steals your picture and text to use for themselves.

I agree! You could be selling a much better version of something than
the other seller, and they could steal your image in order to mislead
potential buyers.