Be Excellent To Each Other

Someone upthread blamed the buyer for destroying it. That's unfair. Once he or she initiated the Paypal dispute, they had no choice but to acquiesce -- if they hadn't have done so, Paypal wouldn't have refunded the $2500. And I find it easy to believe they wouldn't have guessed, going in to the process, that Paypal could require the destruction of the object. Although that term is buried in the T&Cs, it's obscure and (until now) hadn't received a lot of press attention (that I've seen, at least. P)

Some analysis I've read suggests this isn't Paypal being dicks for the sake of it so much as attempting to appease big international brands who's stuff is often copied, like fashionware. eBay is a perfect place to sell counterfeit goods and allegedly it adopted a zero-tolerance policy on counterfeits to avoid legal troubles.

It's potentially unfair. If the buyer was properly mis-sold the item, they were correct to smash it to get their refund.

If they were mis-sold the item on the basis that they were a moron who can't read, and thought they were getting an original for a steal instead of a repro for a reasonable price, and knowingly went down the dispute/smashy-smashy route to get their money back on something they purchased fairly, then they're an arsehole.

Your body didn't read the small print on your face and smashed it up for a refund.

I'll hedge my bets and declare all three parties to be dicks. Common sense didn't prevail, anyway.

I'd quite like to buy counterfeit goods. If I know they are, I've never really seen the problem. Apart from diluting the manufacturer's IP and stuff.

You're funding TEH TERRURIZTS!!

If you take a perfectly good quality, functional musical instrument and destroy it, you are a fucking arsehole, no matter what. Money doesn't even come into that. Corps who take a zero-tolerance policy on potential counterfeit goods are dicks too, for the very reason that a one-size fits all approach to such things inevitably leads to smashed violins, metaphorically speaking. The seller? Well, she sold a violin in good faith, and the person who smashed her violin, if they didn't want it after all, should be punished for this.

What? So if you were the buyer in this case, and assuming that violin wasn't worth the $2500 you paid, you'd have kept it and refused paypal's refund?

I wouldn't have destroyed the thing... and I'd have had some proper discussion with the seller, at which point the issue of it being 'a fake' and thus of no worth would have been somewhat resolved. Lastly, if I were spending that on an instrument, I'd know something about them.

Bottom line is, you don't destroy a hundred year old working instrument like that, regardless of what it may or may not be. This guy is an irresponsible fucking drone, whether the law and big business are on his side or not.

Sure. So what if you know it's worth a fraction of what you paid, the seller tells you to go piss up a rope, and Paypal demands the violin's destruction and won't do anything else until you comply? What then? We don't know this is what happened, but we don't know it isn't either. To dismiss the buyer here as an "irresponsible fucking drone" without any more evidence about what actually happened is rude.