STATE COLLEGE — More than 10,000 free tickets made available to the public for a memorial service for Penn State football coach Joe Paterno were snapped up in seven minutes today, with some offered for sale on eBay before the site pulled those ads.

The service will be held Thursday at the school’s 16,000-seat basketball arena, the Bryce Jordan Center. It will also be broadcast live on cable TV’s Big Ten Network and streamed live on the channel’s companion website and the Penn State athletics site.

Paterno, the winningest coach in major college football, died of cancer Sunday at age 85.

The memorial service tickets were offered first-come, first-served to the public through the athletics website, with a limit of two per person. An athletic department spokeswoman said it’s possible attendance will exceed the arena’s official capacity because there likely will be seats on the floor.

Amanda Coffee, spokeswoman for eBay Inc., said the site has unspecified internal controls to remove inappropriate ads. She said eBay doesn’t “allow the sale of tickets to events in which all tickets are free to the public” and yanked ads seeking money for tickets to the memorial.