On Her Majesty's shopping service

The anonymity of online auction sites is encouraging some questionable ethics

OK, so The Living Daylights wasn't a great film, the A-ha theme aside, and Dalton wasn't a great Bond.

The film, though, or the DVD edition at least, has become something of an online phenomenon, regularly selling for upwards of £50 on auction sites such as eBay.

When you consider that you could have snapped it up for £9.99, or free with any other Bond a year ago, that's not a bad return on a fairly small investment.

It's been deleted, apparently on account of Sam Neill's screen test for the lead role - which he never played - being included in the DVD extras.

As such it's become a bit of a rarity, and is the common gap in hundreds of collections the world over.

Anyone looking to complete their set and collect all the parts of the gun-barrel logo that runs across their spines therefore has no choice but to pay a premium.

Well, the good news is that the discs are set to be re-released in November so, if you're on the verge of coughing up more than you can afford, hold off.

But this isn't a film mag - the issue here is the ethics of aesthetics. How ethical is it to sell something that has little purpose beyond its aesthetic value at a price well beyond what it is soon set to cost?

The web, it is said, is a place where you can be anyone you want to be. You can hide your true identity behind myriad facades, and if you are careful you can disappear quickly and almost without a trace.

As such it encourages less scrupulous users to do things they would never think of doing in the real world.

"This title has been deleted and will probably never be released again. Add this rare and exclusive disc to your 007 DVD collection NOW, while you still can," claims one seller, echoing the assertions of so many others.

One can only assume that most know of the forthcoming re-release, which is why they are happy to break up their treasured collections and lose the only one that would be difficult to replace.

The reply from one seller to whom I posed this question was startling in its honesty: "I know - that's why I'm selling mine ;-)."

He was listing the disc with a reserve of more than four times the price of the re-released original. But still others are taking advantage of online ambiguity to push the legal limits to the limit.

"This is a back-up DVD," explains one seller, but not on the eBay site. What he has posted for sale on eBay looks like the genuine article: an original region two disc.

The description contains a link that takes you off to some free web space, though, and it is only there, out of the clutches of eBay's legal eagles, that you find out what is really on sale.

"You are legally allowed to back up any DVD which you own for your own personal use in case something happens to the original," he claims.

"The original [of this disc] is a very rare DVD, which has been deleted and as such is worth up to £100. It would seem sensible therefore to have a back-up in case anything happens to the original or use this back-up to preserve your original.

"Not everybody has the ability to back up their own DVDs, right? What I am providing is a service. You are paying £17.99 (plus £2 P&P) for that service. I am not selling you the DVD. You get that free of charge because you have the original."

So, what is for sale is not the real deal. It's not the disc itself but a copy. And is this seller going to check whether everyone who makes a purchase really does have an original? Perhaps, but I suspect not.

He, like so many others, is well aware of the desirability of the disc in question and seems happy to cross the line that would otherwise separate legitimate actions from those of the P2P file sharer.

Unless the auctioneers do more to police the goods sold on their sites they will be the next target of the politician looking to make a quick headline, or the right-wing newspaper after a scandal to increase sales. Or the magazine columnist ...

Auction sites will be considered no better than the original Napster, and it will take only one naive politician to mistakenly buy a copied disc for the whole industry to be tabled for parliamentary debate.

Fortunately eBay implements a strict set of terms and conditions of use, and will follow up complaints against any advertiser within 36 hours, but should it not be responsible for checking all listings before they go live?

Sadly, though, the ethics of aesthetics seem to be nigh-on non-existent. The desire to have a completed logo stretching across the spines of 20 DVDs has created a black market in the discs themselves, and MGM cannot be happy about that.

I suspect that if it would just put the cover art on its site as a downloadable pdf, countless potential owners would happily print it out and wrap it around an empty case to plug the gap in their collection until the real thing comes out.

Then again, as some would put this film fairly low in their list of priorities, perhaps they'd just plug the gap and not bother with the re-release at all.