COPIES OF THE latest edition of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which sold out within hours across France yesterday, are being offered on eBay for thousands of euros, prompting a media watchdog to blast sellers for “indecent” profiteering.
The online selling and auction site had one vendor listing the new Charlie Hebdo issues at €15,000 for immediate purchase, compared to the cover price of just three euros.
It was not known how serious the offers were, or if the vendors actually possessed the copies.
But the Paris-based media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders expressed anger at the apparent opportunism.
eBay
“What is happening on eBay… is absolutely indecent,” said its director, Christophe Deloire.
People abroad have tried to trademark the phrase ‘jesuisCharlie’. There is a sort of parallel trade being organised that is totally reprehensible, lamentable, indecent.
Later eBay announced it was banning scanned and digital copies of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, adding that it would also hand over the commissions it received on sales of the edition and other paraphernalia sold on its French website.
The first 700,000 copies of what has been dubbed the “survivors’ edition” of Charlie Hebdo after last week’s deadly attacks sold out across France in just a couple of hours early Wednesday.
The magazine issue controversially features a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed on its cover.
The assault by Islamist gunmen on Charlie Hebdo’s Paris office a week ago that killed 12 people has triggered a global outpouring of public support for the irreverent title.
Huge demand
A print run initially set for three million has been increased to five million to meet the huge demand. Copies were also to be put on sale in other countries around the world later this week.
The French President Francois Hollande has proclaimed that “Charlie Hebdo is alive and will live on”.
“You can murder men and women but you can never kill their ideas,” Hollande said as the new edition.
The weekly had long been threatened by a loss of readership but “today it is reborn”, he added
It will have a print run of five million issues this week, dwarfing the pre-attack circulation of around 60,000.
Unfortunately, Irish readers will not be able to buy the edition in one of Ireland’s largest distributors, Easons, who said that people looking to buy it will have to order it from smaller outlets.
However, RTÉ reports that distributors have said almost 1,900 copies of the magazine have been ordered by 120 retailers in Ireland.
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