gyg wrote in Interesting Non-TSR Items Currently on eBay:
Not the seller I'm afraid.

I'm pretty sure the seller knows what they are doing, this book has definitely gone for a premium in the past.

To be honest I would quite like a copy just for interests sake, but not at any more than a "standard" hard back would go for - when I saw the price point my feeling was it was a bit of a fishing excercise, perhaps hoping that someone thought they were getting something special without knowing what it was.

Is this seller breaking the law? Not sure, particularly if the have acquired it second hand, perhaps as part of a collection. The answer might be different if they were printing these out personally.

Is this a case of caveat emptor? Not sure again, but maybe a bit if due diligence is in order.

Whatever happens the seller will sell this, if not through eBay then certainly via a direct message from someone seeing this thread and who is happy to make an offer - cynical maybe, but probably true.

(All my opinions of course YMMV)

The PDF is a fan produced compilation and is available free online for close on a decade now.

As for breaking the law, technically they are breaking copyright law, the same way stealing pants in California is stealing, but if the owner of the IP has no interest or inclination to enforce the IP, then by definition it is an abandoned IP and he's never likely to even received a CD letter let alone any form of thread from Hasbro/WotC.
And eBay will not enforce IP complaints form the public champions of moral do-goodery, because a) The IP owner doesn't want it enforced, and b) They make their % cut from selling perfectly legal products on their website.

It'll no doubt get relisted and the buyer has the pleasure of causing the seller a little annoyance, and the seller gets his $200 bucks from some idiot who needs to learn the leason of not buying random sh!t online without checking out what you're buying first.

I don't see that it harms the brand or the hobby in any way. There are far bigger fish out there damaging the brand, and the hobby (collecting) is more liquid and has greater capital than any of the noise that these incidental little sales can ever impact.

As I see it, the seller is selling a PoD product that he made himself, at a price higher than it cost him to print it.
The only morally questionable act is the reprinting of who's IP is abandoned by the IP owner, but from whom he no doubt would have received a refusal if he had asked permision at the time the product was printed. But that is how fan based products work. Fanzines have always been that way. This is an aggregaed collection of photocopied materials from a slew of of other publications spanning some 30 years as I understand it.

What he is doing though is teaching those among us in society who have never learned how to value their time and effort accurately, how the money they earn is not always the same as what they buy with it. Mr Muppet buys something based on desire and self-justification, realises what he has bought is not equal in value to the money he parted with, and feels regret and remorse for having given in to his desire. Hopefully he learns that lesson and doesnt do it again. If he doesnt he repeats it over and over, and sooner or later he manages to establish a value for money that he is happy with (compared to how hard it is for him to get money) or he becomes one of the fools who is always easily parted from their money. Which is why we have people who live paycheck to paycheck and have houses full of useless sh!t in the world.

Now, most people learn the lessons quickly with cheap stuff when they are first presented with the abundant offering on eBay. My children are going through a similar thing buying plastic crap that looks great in the store, with their allowance only to be disappointed with it when they open them and they realise its just pretty looking tat.

So from a moral point of view I'm pretty agnostic so long as he isn't blatantly outright lying. Hasbro/WotC outright abandoned their IP a long time ago, and arguably have done much more harm than anyone else to the D&D game over time. There has always been push and pull between fans and their fan made products and the game producer and their product line, and having watched the ups and downs over the past 40 years or so, I'm too old to care about the actual IP holder when the creative minds themselves have been crapped upon the way they have over the years.

Is the seller a good guy, as you put it? Probably not. He's probably just an average joe trying to make a buck.

Don't remember saying this was a good seller but I'm pretty ambivalent about him.
Seems he sells pod stuff at a small profit to those too lazy or otherwise to do any research.  Not sure if he's trying to rip anyone off, as he seems pretty up front about it but as I did say, caveat emptor.
Mbassoc is, as always, pretty spot on with his take on the subject. As for this book, I say again, I certainly would buy it at a decent price just to have a copy to flick through, but the listed price that Gregory pulled the trigger on was laughable, which is kind of what I should have said in the first place, rather than my flippant (or sarcastic) comment when I first posted about it.

gyg wrote in Interesting Non-TSR Items Currently on eBay:Just read the thread back - to be clear when I said " a good seller nonetheless" I was referring to the item and not to the seller.
Sorry clarity seems to be an issue in this thread, perhaps I should have posted it in the " stupid as shit items on eBay" thread rather than this one just so people would read it and not decide it was a good idea to bid on it and then back out on the sale after doing their due diligence.

Yeah, that’s how I read it. Why is a different matter though. It’s now much different in content from the others that came out at the time by the fanboys. May good cover choice or may it not being the one that people chose to have printed. I don’t get why anyone would want a hardcopy when the PDF is free and you can print the pages you need at home. As a book it was pretty disjointed and a mess. That’s how I recall it. I haven’t looked at the PDF in a couple of years.

To address Gregory’s point - People sell copyright infringing materials on eBay all the time. It’s how they make their money. No-one gives a F at eBay or the IP owners. There is an endless supply of copyright infringing t’shirts, mugs, books, illuminated signs etc. in D&D alone. I get that some people are affronted by this, but once you’ve been using eBay for a decade or two, you realise that all you are doing is getting yourself all wound up about something you can do nothing about, something that does not affect you in any way, and something that barely 1 in a 1000 even have an opinion on. If you don’t want something, don’t buy it. It’s that simple.

Of course if you live in the UK you can have greater impact on this sort of thing if you were one of these clarion calling white knights of WotC protection. You see, over here we have a 100% guarantee of full refund for any reason at all from eBay (so long as the item is returned to the seller.) so you pay, take delivery, bend it, crease it, fold it in half, drill a hole though it, whatever, and then send it back with tracking. You tell eBay it arrived damaged and you get a full refund. Seller then has to explain to eBay why eBay should suck up the loss and not him, and he’ll lose. UK buyer will always be refunded by eBay no matter what because of distance selling law in the UK. Which is why, if I were a seller, I would not sell to anyone in the UK unless I knew then and trusted them. For something over about $40 it probably isn’t worth the risk unless you’re a business that can absorb losses from those who suffer from buyer’s remorse.

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CDM1 still in shrink... not so common!

£134 with a couple if hours to go and still reserve not met, bloody hell you could practically buy a Lost Handbook for that!
Seriously though, what's the going rate for one of these boxsets? (I would have put £100 as a pretty decent price, maybe a bit more for the shrink)

£175 in the end, decent price

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Not sure of the going rate for one of these but too rich for my blood