You Cannot Sell the Sun!

I have a t-shirt with the warning “You cannot split the sun!” on the back. It’s a souvenir of the first time I spoke at the Odyssey Fantasy Workshop. It seems there was a student who wrote a story in which a character did something to split the sun in the half. The class unanimously roared, “You cannot split the sun!” And when they created their class t-shirt, that’s what they put on it.

Well, it seems there’s a lady in Madrid who has been making a nice little business of selling plots of “land” on the surface of the sun—selling them on eBay, in fact. Until eBay shut her down. Now she’s taking eBay to court. Here’s what Newser.com had to say about it:

She had been selling parcels of about 11 square feet for about $1 each and had racked up 600 orders before eBay shut her down....

“I am not a stupid person and I know the law,” Duran has said of her solar real estate gambit. She's basing her claim on a loophole in the UN's Outer Space Treaty that says no nation can stake ownership to a heavenly body but makes no mention of individuals.

The court, alas, will rule only on whether she violated eBay’s terms of agreement, not on whether she can claim ownership over these plots on the sun.