14 DAY TRIAL // As the song goes, the Moon belongs to everyone and the best things in life are free. Just not the Sun. Au contraire, our parent star apparently belongs to one Maria Angeles Duran, a woman from Vigo, Spain, who claimed ownership of it in 2010.
No, really, this Spanish woman actually has a perfectly legal (and nonsensical, some might want to add) document signed by a notary and identifying her as the owner of the Sun.
True, there is also an international agreement clearly stating that no country can claim ownership of a planet, let alone the Sun and the Moon. But Maria Angeles Duran is no country. She's just a woman who knows how to work around the law. “There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first,” the proud owner of our solar system's central fiery orb explains.
Since it was hers, the woman tried to sell plots of land on the Sun
Having claimed ownership of the Sun, Maria Angeles Duran did what pretty much anybody in her position would have done: she tried to make some cash off of it.
At first, she thought about compelling, well, everybody in the whole wide world pay for the privilege to use the star. Naturally, nobody took her seriously and so she had to come up with some other idea. And she did. Oh boy, did she.
In a nutshell, she took to eBay to sell plots of land on the sun at the price of €1 ($1.11) per square meter (about 10 square feet). She even got about 600 orders before eBay pulled the plug on her business.
The Spanish woman is now suing the e-commerce company
As mentioned, in was back in 2010 that Maria Angeles Duran claimed ownership of the Sun. Come 2013, she launched her little business on eBay. By 2014, her account on the website was blocked and the woman was filing suit against the e-commerce company.
IBT tells us that, following a series of preliminary hearings, a court in Madrid eventually ruled that the woman's complaints against eBay were as legitimate as can be and that the case could not simply be dismissed. The actual trial is set to begin later this year, sometime in mid-July.
Maria Angeles Duran insists that, by not allowing her to sell plots of land on the Sun but nevertheless charging €101 (nearly $113) in commission, eBay breached contract. By the looks of it, she wants the e-commerce company to pay her roughly €10,000 ($11,200) in compensation.
eBay, on the other hand, defends its actions and says that, since the plots of land that self-proclaimed Sun-owner Maria Angeles Duran was selling could not be touched or transported, the sale met all the necessary criteria to be labeled a scam.
Not to get into technicalities, but just for the record, it must be said that, as any other star, the Sun is basically a ginormous ball of insanely hot gas, mostly hydrogen (about 70%) and helium (around 28%). So, even if rightfully hers, the Spanish woman couldn't really sell plots of land on it as there is no land on the Sun to market.