UK politicians call for "making the resale of goods purchased using an automated bot an illegal activity"

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Just now, Racxie said:

But there are now laws in place to make it illegal to resell concert tickets. Sure it may have taken a long time to get here, but better late than never. I'm personally not expecting anything to come out of this for a long, but even a formal discussion is a small step in the right direction.

That is different, because re-sale of tickets is illegal regardless of how you bought it. But here they don't want to go against your general right to resell your goods, which makes it a bit more wishful than effective.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

2 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

One would think so, but...

 

(full text of the motion)

Well I be dammed... If only Governments reacted this quickly when this crap has been going on for products people needed the most...

[Master Disaster]

57 minutes ago, Downkey said:

This is a W

If by W you mean wasteoftime that is.

 

There's no way they can enforce this, how could they ever prove you used a bot to purchase the item?

[Racxie]

5 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

That is different, because re-sale of tickets is illegal regardless of how you bought it. But here they don't want to go against your general right to resell your goods, which makes it a bit more wishful than effective.

That's not entirely true as there are legal/official channels of reselling tickets e.g. Ticketmaster has its own channel for reselling tickets. The law is more in place to prevent resale on sites like eBay for hugely inflated prices, or to prevent people reselling purely for the purpose of making a profit.

[abc_123]

How do they propose to determine if something was bought by a bot and even enforce this?

[LAwLz]

17 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

This is probably more in response to bots buying up PPE and cleaning supplies during COVID-19. If you really think the Government cares that you can't get your PS5 or RTX 3070, you're kidding yourself. This is for more important items. 

They are specifically saying it is to address things like game console sales.

That's why I call it virtue signaling, and it seems like some people are falling for it hard.

 

  

3 minutes ago, Emily123 said:

How do they propose to determine if something was bought by a bot and even enforce this?

They don't propose anything. They are basically just saying "scalpers are bad, we should do something about it. Let's make it illegal".

[abc_123]

I wonder if this would make it illegal to resell things bought on ebay using the autobid feature?

[Racxie]

8 minutes ago, Emily123 said:

I wonder if this would make it illegal to resell things bought on ebay using the autobid feature?

I think the intention is about preventing bots being used to mass purchase goods on the same or multiple sites, as opposed to bidding on a singular item on an auction platform such as eBay.

[abc_123]

28 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

That's why I call it virtue signaling, and it seems like some people are falling for it hard.

 

 

It's worth noting that this is also an 'Early Day motion' and there's little prospect of it even being debated in the house.

 

Quote

Early day motion (EDM) is a colloquial term for a notice of motion given by a Member for which no date has been fixed for debate. EDMs exist to allow Members to put on record their opinion on a subject and canvass support for it from fellow Members. In effect, the primary function of an EDM is to form a kind of petition that MPs can sign and there is very little prospect of these motions being debated on the floor of the House.

https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-information-office/p03.pdf
 

Further reading:

 

https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/business/edms/

https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/business/debates/

https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/

 

[Brooksie359]

52 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

This is probably more in response to bots buying up PPE and cleaning supplies during COVID-19. If you really think the Government cares that you can't get your PS5 or RTX 3070, you're kidding yourself. This is for more important items. 

They don't need a new law for that. That is already illegal. If you resell those types of supplies at above market prices then you will get hit with price gouging laws regardless if you used a bot to purchase the goods. 

[DildorTheDecent]

The gov does these "policing the internet" stunts all the time.

 

Bunch of virtue signalling, knee-jerk reaction wankers.

[Racxie]

19 minutes ago, Emily123 said:

 

It's worth noting that this is also an 'Early Day motion' and there's little prospect of it even being debated in the house.

 

https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-information-office/p03.pdf
 

Further reading:

 

https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/business/edms/

https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/business/debates/

https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/

 

This is something I really wanted to highlight in the original post, but as it was my first post on these forums I wanted to follow the rules quite strictly until I'm more comfortable with what's acceptable here.

[Velcade]

oh boy. 

[poochyena]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Let me explain this in simple terms: if there are 10 apples and 15 people want an apple, but I buy 9 of them before anyone else gets to because I used a bot, then 8 people will be needlessly left without an apple or will be forced to pay an inflated price and buy one from me. If I hadn't done that then more people would have been able to get the apple they wanted.

problem with that analogy is this is non-essential goods and are continuously being produced. Everyone will get what they want, just takes a little extra time.

[Blademaster91]

But how do they determine who are bots, and how would they force retailers to stop bots?

[Racxie]

18 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

But how do they determine who are bots, and how would they force retailers to stop bots?

Well if it does go further than the very early initial discussion stage then it's likely they'd consider that later. There are provisions in place for event tickets already, so they might look at adopting a similar approach.

 

Also I'm not 100% sure but I believe it's possible for the sellers to detect bots, so the responsibility could fall on them to put things in place.

[tech.guru]

2 hours ago, Racxie said:

Summary

 UK MPs will be looking to discuss the possibility of banning the resale of computer components & consoles at inflated prices in a similar vain as event tickets.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

This is a small step in the right direction considering how difficult it is to buy the latest GPUs, CPUs, and consoles, though as the article points out it could be a while before this leads anywhere.

 

If it is fruitful then hopefully the rest of the world will follow suite, although I don't expect it to stop scalpers entirely but may still deter some.

 

Sources

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk-parliament-reseller-bots/

https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/57862

A law thats pointless and hard to prove.

 

How you going to determine what items bought from bots? 

[Bombastinator]

It’s an interesting concept.  Might complicate automatic wholesale ordering though.  It would need to be looked at closely to make sure that if it does get in the way of legitimate stuff that a solution is available. 

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, tech.guru said:

A law thats pointless and hard to prove.

 

How you going to determine what items bought from bots? 

That’s actually the easiest bit.  It would have to be after the fact.  Would take some time, which means fast transfers would complicate things.  Wouldn’t be something that could be blocked in fractions of a second in a lot of cases.

[tech.guru]

4 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

That’s actually the easiest bit.  It would have to be after the fact.  Would take some time, which means fast transfers would complicate things.  Wouldn’t be something that could be blocked in fractions of a second in a lot of cases.

Its not easy at all, game developers play wack a mole with bots all the time.

 

Its very difficult to determine bot versus humans. In addition bot developers do all sort of things to make behavior look more human

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, poochyena said:

problem with that analogy is this is non-essential goods and are continuously being produced. Everyone will get what they want, just takes a little extra time.

So what? Plenty of things are illegal to do even though they aren't strictly life threatening to anyone. For example it's illegal to spray paint someone's house without permission, even though having that house spray-free is not essential to the owner. People acting like assholes is sometimes reason enough to legislate against it and I think this is one of those cases - I can't imagine a situation where someone does this without the intention to scalp.

[porina]

So people really think because it is difficult to do, means we shouldn't try at all? It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Even a shift in the balance would be better than nothing.

 

Not saying it will happen, but suppose such a law was passed. That could for example compel online resale sites like ebay, Amazon, facebook and others to remove resales that go against that. It wont stop it, but it would increase the resale difficulty. That in itself might deter some.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, tech.guru said:

Its not easy at all, game developers play wack a mole with bots all the time.

 

Its very difficult to determine bot versus humans. In addition bot developers do all sort of things to make behavior look more human

Easiest and easy are not always the same.

[poochyena]

34 minutes ago, Sauron said:

So what? Plenty of things are illegal to do even though they aren't strictly life threatening to anyone. For example it's illegal to spray paint someone's house without permission, even though having that house spray-free is not essential to the owner. People acting like assholes is sometimes reason enough to legislate against it and I think this is one of those cases - I can't imagine a situation where someone does this without the intention to scalp.

I never mentioned life threatening, I just said essential. Spray painting someone's house financially harms the home owner since repairs will have to be made or the home owner's property value is decreased. Having to wait an extra week or two to buy a console doesn't result in physical or financial harm.

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, CircleTech said:

It will be enforced the same way the UK enforced P0rn: In an ineffective manner easy to circumvent.

 

If the UK outlaws buying products with bots, then Scalpers could simply pay for VPS servers in the US, then have their bots ship the card to the UK. That way the illegal activity occured outside their jurisdiction and it is unenforcable. Just like the p0rn laws which can easily be circumvented by using a VPN.

This I think is a good corollary to my earlier point.  It has issues as worded.  The intent might be reasonable, but it’s got to actually work in practice.