Roommate puts IU student up for auction on Internet site

The eBay post reads loud and clear:\n"IU ROOMMMATE FOR SALE!! MUST SELL! Finals are coming!"\nHow much would you pay for a curly-haired, 19-year-old dorm-dweller? As of press time, at least $14.50.\nWednesday, freshman Joe Minkner posted a curious auction on eBay.com -- his roommate, freshman Chris Carr.\n"My mom thinks it's hilarious," Minkner said. "But she thinks I should be studying for finals instead of playing on eBay."\nMinkner said the idea sparked when the duo learned of a "haunted" walking cane served up on the popular auction site. When bidding concluded, the "ghost cane" was shipped for the tidy sum of $65,000.\n"So I told him I didn't like him and I was going to sell him on eBay," Minkner said. "Then it just blew up huge."\nAs of Thursday evening, the freshman's post had received more than 800 hits, but Minker said the auction was never meant to be taken literally.\n"I didn't want eBay or anyone who reads it to think I was serious," he said. "It was a funny joke."\nThe post is indicative of other unusual auction listings from eBay's archives. In February 1999, someone offered 24 Japanese children for sale. Three hours after the post, eBay nixed the auction, but one bidder had already pledged $51.\nIn November 1999, another seller listed an auction for "the entire Internet." The auction that would make a "perfect Christmas gift for ... evil dictators" fetched a $1 million bid before meeting its demise.\nA Brazilian UFO detector went up for sale in March 2000 -- AA batteries included -- in a completed sale. "Zallures," an eBay bidder, bought the piece for $135.03 plus shipping and handling.\nFor sellers, the auctions may be all in fun. But Professor of Marketing Thomas Hustad said the "wacky" auctions represent a dangerous trend. An auction such as Minkner's, he said, is an inappropriate display of dehumanization.\n"If something like this continues to escalate then there are boundaries of taste and ethics that may be crossed," Hustad said. "Nobody has the authority to sell a person, not even the person himself. It's a very poor joke."\nHustad said some fictitious auctions can be benign -- such as the ghost cane that was purchased by www.GoldenPalace.com. In those cases, he said, there is no assumption of validity, as the buyer considers the purchase efficient advertising.\n"They may say the cost that they pay is cheap publicity for an equivalent amount of notoriety," Hustad said.\neBay has explicit rules forbidding unethical auctions. According to the Web site's restricted items policy, "Humans, the human body or any human body parts may not be listed on eBay."\nMinkner said most his friends who have seen the site get the joke. But Hustad said fictitious auctions run counter to eBay's mission.\n"When the nature of the object becomes strange, like in this transaction, it becomes very different than what the intent of eBay really is," he said. \nThough Carr was still for sale at press time, his auction is not without fine print.\n"Note to Buyer -- Actual person and his belongings not for sale," the post claims. "Winner receives a good laugh only."\n-- Contact senior writer Rick Newkirk at renewkir@indiana.edu.