From the article, it seems that container losses don't generally happen one at a time, but rather you have some event where a ship loses hundreds at once. I guess if you're quick maybe you could get a ship in and scoop them up before they sink, but in order to save more than a few you'd need a big ship and most of the time you'd just be sitting around waiting for the next container loss event, and the ship would sit idle for months or years.

I'm assuming that if it sinks in deep water it's gone, but even there maybe there's an opportunity to salvage containers off the sea floor with the right equipment. Probably not worthwhile economically, but who knows?

Maybe the best case for this could be made for ships that normally at sea doing other things to be ready to divert from their ordinary tasks to collect containers if they don't have anything more pressing. (Coast Guard ships or Navy support vessels perhaps?)

Just because there's an entire container ship worth of containers floating in the ocean doesn't mean you have to retrieve all of them...

His point is that container losses happen in bursts, so you'd spend a lot of time idle while waiting for a container loss. If you can't pick up enough of those containers, you'd be losing money to keep your ship ready-to-go.

deep sea robot recovery for materials recovery/recycling? likely not profitable now but, well, time makes fools of us all.

I'd guess that the median economic value of the contents of some random container that's been saturated in sea water is probably pretty low. The container itself is worth a bit if it's still usable as a container, otherwise it's what it's worth as scrap metal.

I'm having trouble imagining many things that would still be valuable. Even things in sealed containers might be crushed by the water pressure. Other than gold bars, what would still be useful? Construction-grade lumber, maybe?

I could imagine this being a rich person's hobby. And maybe the basis of a Netflix series or something, like shows about the gold miners in Alaska.

Selling on eBay is theft. The contents if those containers belongs to someone. You can possibly make a living recovering the container for the owner, but if you don't agree to a price beforehand the lawyers will make a killing in court deciding what you should get.

I would assume the legality depends on where the container fell.

North Korea and a few similar countries. Otherwise all countries recognised some form of law which is things lost at sea are still owned by the person/org that lost it.

Oh, interesting, I didn't have a sense of how widespread that was.

I remember this 300-year-old Spanish shipwreck that was dredged up by a private company. The Spanish government then sued and won. They had to give back ~500k coins. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44302476

I'm not sure how I feel about the outcome. In particular it seems odd that Spain could indefinitely claim ownership, even if they have no intention of recovering the wreck. That being said, I don't strictly believe "finders keepers" applies here either.