Apple’s iPhone frenzy: iPhone email addresses are hot sellers, but is it legal?
I’ve never been one to jump on any passing bandwagon, but every once in a while a new product comes out that looks so sexy, I even think it might be worth being an early adopter. Apple’s iPhone is just one of those products. It’s sleek, smooth, has great software on the Mac OS X operating system, and like most Apple products, has a very appealing design aesthetic.
The folks at Apple definitely know how to build buzz for their products, too. For the first 30 days after the iPhone debuted on June 29, 2007, the phone will only be available at Apple and AT&T retail stores. After 30 days have passed, the floodgates open. Knowing that eBay sellers often ignore niceties like official release dates and limited license agreements, I decided it would be fun to peruse the Apple iPhone auctions currently being offered on Ebay. I just wanted to see what the Powersellers were doing and how they were taking advantage of the marketing frenzy about this new phone.
I have to commend eBay for being remarkably diligent in removing pre-sale auctions for the iPhone itself. While I was browsing the auction site, there was only one auction for the actual cell phone, and it disappeared during the three minutes I spent reading another auction that caught my eye: an auction that was ending soon for a Yahoo email address related to iphone. That’s right, someone created a new email address on Yahoo and sold it on Ebay. When I first looked at the auction there was an hour left on the bidding and at that time there were six bids with one high bid just over $15.00. When the auction ended an hour later, the bidding had closed with more than 40 bids and one winning bid of more than $400. What kind of fool is offering $400 for an email address when anyone can go and create an address for free on Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail? I don’t make sense of it.
The kicker in this story is that under Yahoo’s terms of service, it’s not even legal to sell one of your email addresses. Their TOS state:
12. NO RESALE OF THE SERVICE You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purpose any part of the Service (including your Yahoo! ID), use of the Service or access to the Service.
The other free services, Gmail and Hotmail etc., basically say the same thing. However, this has not stopped eBay entrepreneurs. There are dozens of iPhone-related email addresses from free email providers currently for sale on Ebay. What a crazy online world we have created.