Why does scp not work?

I can get a connection with WiFi, but eth0 does not work. I can see it via ssh:

2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST8000> mtu 1500 qdisc noop qlen 1000
    link/ether <redacted> brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

but setting it up throws an error (doing this from the CoreELEC UI addon just does nothing and the button snaps back to “off”):

ip link set eth0 up
ip: ioctl 0x8914 failed: Device or resource busy

That doesn’t sound right.

What am I missing?