Shanghai police are investigating an online ad offering babies for sale on the Chinese subsidiary of auction website eBay.
The ad was deleted shortly after it was placed and relevant information has been turned over to investigators.
Media reports said the ad offered baby boys for 28,000 yuan ($3,500) and girls for 13,000 yuan ($1,600), reflecting the traditional Chinese preference for males. It promised to deliver infants within 100 days of birth.
"Our aim is to send good news to the thousands of couples around the country who are unable to have children," the site was quoted as saying by the Shanghai Morning Post. The newspaper said it learned of the ad from a reader.
A Shanghai police spokeswoman said she had no information on the case and suggested it was being handled by a district bureau. However, no such case had been registered in Shanghai's Huangpu district, where the site has its offices.
Chinese law allows punishments up to death for people who sell infants, along with lesser penalties for buyers and brokers. However, the law doesn't say whether an offer of such a sale alone constitutes a crime.
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Phone for free: In a few short years, users can expect to make telephone calls for free, with no per-minute charges, as part of a package of services through which carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees, eBay's chief executive Meg Whitman said.
The company is betting that by combining electronic markets, online payment systems and web-based communications, it can emerge as a leader in all three businesses.
Skype, which allows free, web-based calls between members, ended September with more than 57 million registered users. EBay (EBAY) said it expects Skype to produce estimated revenues of $60 million in 2005, and more than $200 million in 2006.
Whitman said Skype's explosive success, would -- over the next several years -- drive the cost of phone calls to nothing.
Whitman also said the transition to completely free voice communications will not happen in the next year or two, but that it could happen in the next three to six years.
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AOL employees SOL: America Online is laying off more than 700 employees, mainly in call centers, as its base of dial-up subscribers continues to slump.
AOL is closing its Orlando, Florida call center and laying off the 450 employees that work there, spokesman Nicholas Graham said. It is also cutting positions in centers in Jacksonville, Florida; Tucson, Arizona and at its northern Virginia headquarters.
Graham attributed the cuts to a decline in members and an increased base of "computer-savvy" users who do a lot of their own troubleshooting.
The cuts amount to about 4 percent of the Time Warner (TWX) unit's 20,000 employees worldwide -- the largest layoff since last December.
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Oh! IL-legal: A federal court has temporarily banned a Los Angeles-based website from claiming that its service lets users legally share copyrighted files.
The Federal Trade Commission said Cashier Myricks Jr., doing business as MP3downloadcity.com, has been barred from suggesting that his $24.95 tutorial and referral service enables users to legally download copyrighted music files, video games and "movies still in theaters." According to the FTC, it doesn't.
A temporary restraining order was issued Sept. 27 by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The FTC is seeking to make the ban permanent, negotiate refunds for consumers who feel they were misled, and require that the defendant notify people who use the service about legal consequences of sharing copyrighted material.
The FTC charged that the web service advertised on websites and sent out misleading claims like: "Best of all, people are not getting sued for using our software. Yes! It is 100 percent legal" and "Download and Watch DVDs and Movies Still in Theaters."
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Nerds helping jocks: IBM (IBM) has developed a new digital media system for the NFL and NFL Films that will streamline and simplify its production flow, while making possible future breakthroughs in the viewing experience, the company said.
Using IBM Total Storage SAN File System technology and Linux, the system allows a show producer or host to use a PC and quickly search through a detailed catalog of game plays. Producers can then review that footage in real time, send it on to editors and generate content collections to be viewed by different producers and hosts simultaneously.
Previously, NFL Films producers like Greg Cosell and hosts like Ron Jaworski and others would have to rely on traditional broadcast systems and manually search through printed NFL game books, view reels of videotapes, note plays on paper logs and manually assemble plays to review later by tape.
NFL Films can retrieve exclusive NFL coaches' footage, providing a more extensive analysis for NFL Network's Playbook and ESPN's EA Sports NFL Matchup television shows. The technology ultimately will allow every offensive, defensive and special teams play to be available on demand internally; eventually it will be available to consumers.
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Compiled by Keith Axline. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
