The 171-year-old jewelry company Tiffany & Co lost to eBay on a suit filed by Tiffany on counterfeit auction listing on eBay. This could be a pleasant surprise for auctioneers like Amazon, Yahoo and Google.

Tiffany’s lawyer’s contacted eBay in 2003 stating that any seller who sells five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry should be automatically deleted. eBay in turn did not consider this demand and stated that, “we are not prepared to do at this time”. This frustrated Tiffany who again approached eBay to ban all silver Tiffany jewelry. eBay again refused the request. eBay was not willing to accept this demand because it felt that considering a listing infringing just because the seller sold multiple items at the same time is not reasonable.

This long argument was finally put to an end by Judge Sullivan on Monday. He mentioned that eBay always removed listings promptly whenever Tiffany notified of any counterfeit goods. He also mentioned that eBay even delayed listings of Tiffany products by 6 to 12 hours just to do a manual check before making the products live. The judge stated, “As a factual matter, there is little support for Tiffany’s allegation that a seller listing five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry is presumptively trafficking in counterfeit goods.”

It should be noted that eBay provides the service VeRO – Verified Rights Owner were a trademark owner can report or remove infringing listings. There are more than 14,000 companies and individual merchants participating in this program. Tiffany is one of them.

eBay spends $5 million each year on its fraud search engine identifying counterfeit listings. The search engine has 13,000 rules set to find out fraudsters through a keyword search algorithm.

Napster announced that it has launched the world’s largest and most comprehensive MP3 DRM free store.

Napster has been online and has been hugely popular way before Apple’s ipod and iTunes store came into picture. Napster’s new Digital Rights Management free store would be a direct competition with Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 downloads.

Amazon has been performing well in recent times offering better quality than iTunes. Napster, though it has considerable amount of consumers, most of them have turned to Amazon and iTunes lately. The task for Napster would be to get back the consumers it lost to these competitors.

Napster has announced that it’s pricing for downloading single MP3 tracks would remain at 99 cents and $9.95 for most of the MP3 albums. Napster is also providing downloads with 256kbps high-quality bitrate along with high resolution album art. Napster provides on-demand streaming service using the Internet without downloading any software.

John Donahoe, the new boss of eBay announced that he wants Ebay to work as a strip market and not as a unruly flea market. Amazon as of late has been taking over most of Ebay’s best buyers and sellers.

Ebay is striving hard to bring up sales and gain vital market places which they lost to close competitors. These competitors had also taken a large pie of Ebay’s financial results. However, Ebay still announced an increase in earnings of 22 percent in the last quarter. The increased profit might be due to its other businesses like Skype an Internet calling service and PayPal a payment service.

eBay stocks have also up by 20 percent to $32.12 after mid march. However, eBay users have not much grown during the last year. The company reported a increase of just 1 percent to 83.9 million.