eBay is refusing to allows users to sell their winning lottery
tickets to attend Michael Jackson's memorial service in Los Angeles
today.
The online auction site said it would remove any listings of the
tickets because such sales are "inappropriate", according to the
BBC.
Tickets were issued on Sunday to 8,750 ticket winners out of the
over 1.5m people from around the world entered the lottery
draw.
Within hours of the tickets being issued, winners began offering
the tickets to the highest bidder on eBay and advertising site
Craiglist.
The move was greeted by a storm of protest by fans.
They pushed up bids on eBay to tens of millions of pounds in an
attempt to prevent ticket holders from profiting and flagged ad as
"inappropriate" on Craiglist.
Jackson's memorial service is expected to be the biggest event
in web history, with several TV stations planning to stream the
event live over the internet.
These include CBS News,
ABC
News,Fox News, and
CNN.
The event will be a major test of the streaming technology as
many news sites
struggled to meet demand in the hours following Jackson's
death.
The average response time from news sites was almost nine
seconds, which is more than double the normal response time of less
the four seconds.