Showcasing a two-minute clip of school kids’ smut is hardly unusual for an online auction company that’s been home to folks wanting to sell their virginity, a ghost in a jar, a windbag (full of air from Hurricane Isabel), evil in a bottle, a hairy armadillo, and a rotten cantaloupe among other things.

Since its founding in the US in 1995, ebay, the parent company of Baazee.com , has flirted with the kooky and the spooky, the nutty and the smutty. But it has also redefined the rules of retailing and is one of the few great successes of the internet age that saw most e-commence ventures flame out.

Although ebay once hosted someone who wanted to sell “one slightly used human soul,” the company’s founder Pierre Omidyar, who still serves as its chairman, is known for his social conscience. Omidyar’s philanthropy comes with a demand for precision delivery: show me it will make a difference.

A school in Coimbatore is among the beneficiaries. In an India connection that predates ebay’s June 2004 acquisition of Baazee.com , the school was rewarded with a modest $ 5000 to build a new toilet block after it proved that girls were dropping out of school when they began menstruating because there were no bathrooms.

On Saturday, ebay reacted angrily to the arrest of its country manager Avnish Bajaj, calling it “completely unwarranted.”

Acknowledging that the listing of the DPS smut clip violated Baazee.com’s policies and user agreement, it said in a statement that the video clip itself was not shown on the site and the offending item was removed from the site once it was discovered.

Moreover, Bajaj had voluntarily travelled to New Delhi to further cooperate with the police. The information provided by Baazee had allowed the police to locate and arrest the seller.

While the US administration made its mandatory inquiries because of Bajaj’s US citizenship, the arrest stirred interest in the cyber community, with some online denizens arguing that the Indian law enforcement just did not understand the business where anyone with an account hawked items in good faith. The items could be removed only when it was reported they had violated the rules.

Chidanad RAJGHATTA Source: Times of India