I know I'm going to be in the minority here, but I think there is an important distinction to be made between "UPS Sold Dahm's 4 Rotor on Ebay" and "Some scumbag working for UPS Sold Dahm's 4 Rotor on Ebay".
I'm not standing up for companies, but people are so quick to find them responsible for every action of their subordinate employees, resulting in our litigious society. I'm not saying UPS is without fault here; they had a responsibility to deliver the package and they failed in doing so.
But there is a big difference between morally reprehensible corporate decisions (Comcast, big Pharma, etc.) where outrage directed at the company makes sense and the situation presented here. It's not like UPS has a corporate policy to steal valuable packages or allow them to easily disappear.
If this was a regular occurrence, no one would ship with them and they would go out of business. For a company shipping so much volume, even if 99.999% of packages are delivered without an issue there are still going to be thousands that don't make it to where they are going, but they are in the minority.
That they hired a scumbag, who stole the package and sold it on Ebay, does not mean UPS as a company should be responsible for the criminal actions of this individual beyond refunding the value of the shipment. If the shipment was insured, their limit of liability should be to make whole the individual whose shipment never arrived.
If there is not an insurance value that could replace what you are shipping (unique one of a kind item) DO NOT SHIP IT via parcel service or freight. It is the shipper's responsibility to know the risks of sending something irreplaceable.
It's the difference between shipping a brand new Tiffany diamond ring valued at 20,000 with 20,000 insurance and shipping grandma's ring she smuggled out of the old country. There is no monetary value to replace grandma's ring. The Tiffany ring can simply be re-ordered and replaced. If the ring never arrived, UPS will simply refund you the insured amount. That seems to be what is happening here even though the guy went through a roundabout way of making that happen by buying the stolen motor and then having UPS reimburse him for the cost of the Ebay auction.
If he had a Macbook Pro stolen, he wouldn't be scouring Ebay trying to find the exact machine, he would have just ordered a new one with the insurance money from UPS. If there was truly unique information on the Macbook that was irreplaceable, the prudent thing would have been to clone the hard drive and transmit the data digitally and then ship a replaceable Macbook.
If there's one thing people should take away from this, it's don't ship unique, irreplaceable things through parcel companies. Only ship things you can easily replace if they don't arrive. If you stick to that rule, you can ship hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, without having any real problems and without needing to sue anyone.