Harold finally gets around to providing another update. He kicks off July with opinions on eBay, changes in Vegas, and the [il]legalities of file sharing.

Oops. I had planned to update this site before heading off on vacation. Hopefully this update will make up in quality what this site has lacked in quantity.

Selling on eBay

This past month, I started selling some Star Wars collectibles on eBay. While I don’t want to disparage eBay as the culrpit behind my lack of site updates, I did find that selling items on eBay can take up quite a bit of time. Just writing the copy for a listing can take awhile, particularly when describing a collectible in excruciating detail for collectors to gauge the value of your item. Taking digital photos for each item, cropping them, and uploading them all consume a lot of time. Figure in the costs of listing the items, the commission eBay (and PayPal, if you accept payments through it) receives and you’ll soon discover that it takes quite a markup to really run any sort of business through eBay. Note that I have not even taken into account the number of people who don’t pay on time (or at all), or those who try to send a form of payment that you did not say that you accept, and then cannot be contacted because their e-mail bounces and their phone lines are busy. However, if I can have two more months like June in terms of sales, I think I can become a Power Seller in no time.

Still, this experience makes me wonder just how many of those thousands of eBay Live attendees actually make enough money to really make a living. eBay does make it fairly easy to start an eBay Store, which makes me question the credentials of Tana from this past season of The Apprentice when she lists “starting a store on eBay” as a reason Trump should hire her. Certainly, business-saavy people can turn a reasonable profit on eBay, but the nature of the beast just does not allow for that many successful sellers to co-exist if their products overlap.

What\’s new in Las Vegas

Las Vegas has certainly changed over the past decade. With all the new hotel/casinos springing up on the strip and on nearby blocks, the city has seen quite a boom. Why, just between my visit there at the end of June and my previous visit not more than six months before, I noticed a couple of not-so-insignificant additions.

The Wynn hotel and casino does look like quite the resort. Steve Wynn must have an affinity for bodies of water, as he follows up the Mirage and the Bellagio with another hotel featuring a lake (and waterfall) in front. Inside, the slot machines and table games reflect the advantage of starting a casino from scratch with all the technology available. None of the slot machines that I saw there operate on coins–instead using the printable ticket system that other casinos have started to employ (and that I wish the airport machines would employ).

If you’ve gambled in Vegas before, then you probably have noticed that you can sign up for a little membership card that you insert into slot machines while you play to earn cashback points or other amenities. Wynn takes his new slots a step further, though, by integrating a “Bonus Bingo” game for his casino club players. About every half hour (per my observations–not official), if you’ve been playing with your Wynn Red Card inserted, the casino club’s promo touch screen will flash that it’s time for Bonus Bingo. Numbers are randomly drawn until, I assume, one lucky player has had his or her electronic bingo board (which you can change in between bingo drawings using that same touch screen) filled in Bingo style (line of 5). It certainly adds a new dimension and incentive to playing slots. Unfortunately, the slot machines there seem rather tight with the payouts.

The blackjack tables feature two types of automatic shuffler. One resembles the kind you might find at other casinos, which basically make you feel like you’re playing from an infinite shoe. The other, however, allows the casino to use a traditional dealer shoe as it takes the six-deck stack of cards and shuffles it while returning another fresh six-deck stack of cards for immediate play. It’s unfortunate that the cards were, for the most part, as cold as the temperature and some of the personnel in that casino.

Speaking of table games, the Bellagio is testing a new table game backed by the World Poker Tour brand name and claims (currently) to have the only such table in town. Players play against the house. Each player makes a blind ante and up to two bonus bets. The first bonus bet pays in varying amounts if the player receives same-suited cards or a pair in his/her initial two cards. The second bonus bet pays if the player’s final hand, taking into account the player’s two cards plus the five community cards from the flop/river/turn, consists of a three of a kind or better. To play, the player may make a 5x or 10x bet to play against the house. The house qualifies against 5x bets if its own hand totals a blackjack hand of at least 13 and qualifies against 10x bets if its hand totals a blackjack 17 or better. If the player folds, he or she only loses the ante–bonus bets are lost or won based solely on that player’s cards, not on what the dealer has. I found the game enjoyable, as you can get into some incredible lucky streaks. From what I’ve heard, the casino thinks the game has some staying power. Not only do players like it, but the casino has made quite a bit off of it thus far! Poker players should note, however, that the crucial element of bluffing is sorely missing from a game like this.

Legal developments in online file sharing

The US Supreme Court dealt a blow to file sharing when it ruled against Grokster and StreamCast on Monday. I hope to look at the case in greater depth but, from what I gather so far, the key to the case lies in differentiating file sharing from the old Sony Betamax case. Both talk about the respective products having non-infringing uses, but the court distinguishes this case by saying, in part, that these file sharing companies induce copyright infringement because they make money off of high-volume usage of the software, and infringing uses (i.e. illegal distribution of copyrighted works) make up the highest volume of the software’s usage. A company that makes VCRs, by contrast, makes money by selling the machine, not because the consumer might record a copyrighted work and, instead of engaging in fair use, distribute it to friends.

I’ll expand on what I said in a paper that I wrote back in law school in that the entertainment industry has greater problems than just people distributing copies. In my paper, I pointed out that the record labels have not addressed concerns of the consumer. CD sales have dropped dramatically since that time. Instead of blaming the falling sales on pirates, blame it on poor marketing. Why pay $15 for a 12-song CD with only one or two good tracks when you can download those two good tracks for $1 apiece from a service like iTunes and burn your own CD for less than a quarter? If you can’t differentiate the CD product from the downloadable burn-it-yourself product, then obviously, people will opt for the cheaper one. Likewise, movie and TV program downloads should serve as an indicator to deeper problems, such as canceling good TV shows before giving them a chance to succeed or releasing poorly conceived movies to theaters that are destined for quick video release.

If people like a product, they will spend the money to buy it instead of settling for a cheap knockoff provided that they have the means to do so. If they don’t have the means to do so, they would not have bought it anyway. Movie studios have pursued product placement revenues already, and should probably enhance this further through physical product tie-ins.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. Hopefully I’ll have more to discuss before August.

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