eBay forbids woman from selling property on the Sun

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I should assume that Spanish courts are required to hear all cases then?

I bet she ended up spending more than the 600 euro she made to fight this in court.

Seems to me, the easiest way to get around this is to sell a “deed” (and to save money on postage, just make it a PDF version and email) to a plot of land on the sun. You are actually providing something to the customer, so I can’t see how eBay could fight it.

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What’s stupid is that, as she noted, Sol is hardly intangible. They could have instead pointed out the UN charter which states that extra-terrestrial land claims by signatories are not recognized.

Actually, the 1967 “Outer Space Treaty” only forbids nations from claiming territorial sovereignty. There is the 1979 “Moon Treaty” which forbids private ownership of extraterrestrial real estate, but it only has 15 signatories and Spain is not one of them (neither is the US, woohoo!).

The thing is though, I mean, don’t you have to at least plant your flag to claim ownership? That is going to be rather hard on a ball of plasma. And if you do own part of the sun, should you get royalties from anyone for any solar radiation including light that hits the Earth? Or, could you get sued by anyone who gets skin cancer from radiation from your plot?

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Planting a flag - not unlike “ownership” itself - is merely symbolic.

It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me that when I was about 13-14 I had quite a few phone calls with the UN trying to claim various regions. They always eventually hung up on me. But my revenge is nearly complete!

Do not purchase. Location inaccessible, weather hot. ONE STAR.

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Claims of territorial sovereignty are only meaningful to the extent that someone is willing and able to enforce them. I can claim Canada as my own private fiefdom, but that’s not gonna do me any good unless I can convince tens of thousands of mounties to see things my way.

So now she’s stuck with that property forever! That’s not fair.

At night, though . . .

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