Ebay

A Baltimore man pleaded guilty yesterday to cheating 66 holiday shoppers out of $29,000 when the PlayStations, Disney World tickets and other goods they supposedly bought in an online auction never arrived. Christopher Lemar Scott, 20, pleaded guilty before Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Paul D. Hackner to running a felony theft scheme last fall and winter. An additional 66 theft charges will be dropped as part of the plea bargain. Police and prosecutors said Scott set up several accounts on the online auction site eBay - including one using the stolen identity of an Arizona man and others using stolen credit card numbers - to sell merchandise that he did not have during the frenzied bidding of the last holiday shopping season.

Clarissa is back where she belongs. The 19th-century porcelain doll was the only item taken last month during a home invasion at Anne Irvin's Baltimore apartment. A woman tricked Irvin into allowing her inside, beat the 80-year-old woman and fled with the 2-foot-tall heirloom. Yesterday afternoon - after Internet sleuthing by Irvin's daughter, a police rescue in Glen Burnie and a special delivery by Baltimore detectives - doll and owner were reunited in a surprise ceremony. The scene unfolded about 1 p.m. in the Canton home of Irvin's daughter, Anne Madison.

Want to buy a helicopter? Or one of 288 diamonds seized from a crooked insurance tycoon? A rickety surgical table gathering dust at Fort Meade? Or even a strip club in Fells Point? At one time or another, all of these items have had one thing in common: Uncle Sam sold them on the Internet, an up-to-date way for the government to unload seized or surplus property. But finding the feds' many versions of eBay hasn't always been easy - a fact that officials are trying to change as they seek to cash in on America's love of a good bargain.

Good morning -- Jay Gibbons -- Did we see your first baseman's mitt on eBay?

There he was, before every major swim in the London Olympics, lost in thought and music pumping from headphones that covered his ears. And now, a clever company wants to sell you a pair of those Michael Phelps headphones. The red, white and blue headphones are available for pre-order on Ebay, through Sol Republic, which has inked a deal with Phelps. The headphones cost $149.99. A portion of the proceeds will to to the Michael Phelps Foundation. "He absolutely loves this brand," his agent Peter Carlisle told ESPN.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A year ago Jacqui Rogers, a retiree in southern Oregon who dabbles in vintage costume jewelry, went on eBay and bought 10 butterfly brooches made by Weiss, a well-known maker of high-quality costume jewelry in the 1950s and 1960s. At first, Rogers thought she had snagged a great deal. But when the jewelry arrived from a seller in Rhode Island, her well-trained eye told her that all of the pieces were knockoffs. Although Rogers received a refund after she confronted the seller, eBay refused to remove hundreds of listings for identical "Weiss" pieces.

EBay Inc.'s U.S. Web site could be forced to abandon its popular "buy-it-now" feature - which accounts for nearly a third of the value of goods sold by the online auctioneer - as a result of a court ruling this week, analysts said yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington on Wednesday upheld a key element of a patent-infringement case filed against eBay by MercExchange and said a lower court was wrong to deny a permanent injunction against the online auction giant.

WASHINGTON- The message that appeared on eBay's open bulletin board in February was joltingly simple and hate-filled: "STUPID FOREIGNER. AUCTION SAID USA BIDDERS ONLY. CAN'T YOU READ????????" But that message from a grocery store owner in a small Tennessee town, who also sells books and toys by mail, isn't the most offensive that can be found on the global auction system that eBay runs over the Internet. Some of the e-mails that individual eBay customers in Canada, Britain and New Zealand have been receiving are even more insulting.

NORFOLK, Va. - eBay Inc. was ordered yesterday to pay $35 million by a federal jury that said the largest Internet auction company was impermissibly using another company's innovations for conducting sales over the Internet. MercExchange LLC of Great Falls, Va., claimed that eBay and its Half.com unit infringed on patents for the technology. The dispute, narrowed before trial, centered on eBay's "fixed-price" sales rather than its traditional auctions that were the centerpiece of the lawsuit filed in 2001 in U.S. District Court in Norfolk.

Some online retailers are moving away from eBay. Irked by February's changes in fees and the feedback-rating system, merchants who once sold wares exclusively at the online auction site can now be found on a number of smaller alternative sites that have sprung up. With names like Wigix, Silkfair, Etsy and Oodle, these sites aim to offer more hand-holding for sellers - and charge lower fees - than the behemoth eBay. Some of these new sites target niche markets, such as Etsy, which focuses on handmade crafts, where small sellers say their products can stand out better than they do at a soup-to-nuts-to-carburetors site like eBay.