2. Consider the following statement: "eBay should not be responsible for monitoring the authenticity of products that are sold through its online business.

The responsibility for that lies with the companies that are worried that someone is selling a counterfeit version of their product.· Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Defend your answer. Counterfeit goods are a problem in many product lines, including perfume, luggage, handbags, pharmaceuticals, designer clothing, shoes, cigarettes, watches, sports memorabilia, and fine wines, to name just a few. One counterfeit group in New York imported watch components that cost it about 27 cents each and then sold them to wholesalers for $12 to $20. The wholesalers then sold them to street vendors for $20 to $30, and the street vendors sold them as Cartier watches for as much as

$250. That was still well below the price of a real Cartier watch (about $1800). Wine makers are also concerned about the counterfeiting of their products because some of the top names in wine (e.g., Chateau Mouton Rothschild and Penfolds Grange)

cost as much as $3000 a bottle, and this is an incentive to counterfeiters to make a lot of easy money.

Wineries are fighting counterfeiting by embedding microchips in the label that can be read with an optical scanner, and by laser-etching the wine's name and vintage year into the bottle