“Officials at San Jose, Calif.-based eBay expressed outrage after the head of its Indian operations was arrested over the weekend for a pornographic video file listed on its site. Avnish Bajaj, Baazee.com country manager, was arrested Saturday after traveling to New Delhi to help authorities track down the source of the sale of a sex clip that appeared on the site in late November. According to eBay officials, the clip was never shown on the site, and they removed the listing as soon as they became aware of its existence for violating the company’s user agreement. The eBay statement claims Bajaj and other Baazee.com employees had been cooperating with authorities to track down the original source of the video clip… The original seller, according to a report by the Khaleej Times, was arrested last week for listing the video clip on the Baazee.com site, though ambiguities in the nation’s 2000 Information Technology Act were enough to convince a judge to place Bajaj in jail for a week without bail. According to the law in India, the report continues, a network service provider or Web site owner can’t be held responsible if they respond to offenses promptly, though provisions within the act are open to interpretation.” —Internetnews.com (US)

Obviously it’s a somewhat quixotic business to censor the content of web sites, since the censors are always running a step beyond the objectionable content being posted. Here in America, for example, eBay does maintain a policy about “racist, hateful, sexual, or obscene” language within its ads, and sometimes this policy gets invoked when auctions are yanked. The regular user agreement specifically forbids “obscene” material or anything containing child pornography. In spite of this, though, plenty of pornographic, sexual, and possibly even “obscene” material gets sold through the site.

In India the authorities are obviously trying to apply a more rigorous “moral” standard to web sites. If you search around eBay’s Indian affiliate, baazee.com, you’ll quickly find that there are almost no “adult” products. Search for “porn,” “pornography,” or “fetish” and you’ll get no results whatsoever. Search for “adult” and you get beanbag chairs and vacation packages. Search for “sex” and you get nothing unless you expand the search to include product descriptions as well as titles. Then you get mostly perfume auctions. About the naughtiest thing on the site is an auction for flavored lubricants. It has the word “sex” hidden in white type in the product description — evidently as a way of beating the censors and finding the horny slobs who search for “sex” on the site.

But still, even if it’s impossible to completely censor the content being sold on web sites, you can see why a more “traditional” country might want to do it. However, that is absolutely no excuse for jailing the executive of an internet company such as eBay — particularly when the executive is trying to help the authorities to track down the budding pornographer who posted objectionable material to the web site! Talk about shooting the messenger! It makes absolutely no sense. It almost makes you want to post a bunch of illicit material to the site, just to inflame the situation and point up what a ridiculous approach it is to the problem…

VideoBox

It's like the iTunes Music Store for Porn. Download unlimited high-quality video for only $9.95/month.