Utah Senate President Looks To Sue Jack Thompson For Continual Spam

from the with-friends-like-these... dept

Disbarred lawyer Jack Thompson, made famous for never missing an opportunity to blame violent video games for any sort of violent activity (despite a near total lack of evidence to support this), has focused his post-lawyer life on trying to get states to pass anti-violent video game laws. Of course, this has been a tough slog. Utah appeared to be his only hope, but even that state eventually vetoed the bill, noting that it didn't make much sense. Thompson, who is known as a prolific emailer, has apparently been emailing Utah politicians quite a bit since this decision came down, and now the President of the Utah Senate (who supported the Thompson's bill) is threatening to go after Thompson using CAN SPAM anti-spam laws, telling Thompson:

I asked you before to remove me from your mailing list. I supported your bill but because of the harassment will not again. If I am not removed I will turn you over to the AG for legal action.

Can't wait to see Thompson claim that this is all part of the conspiracy of video game fans against him. Clearly, the video gamers have somehow brainwashed the President of the Utah Senate...

13 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Utah Governor Vetoes Video Gaming Law, Noting Unintended Consequences And Likely First Amendment Issue

from the saving-taxpayer-money dept

Well, this is a surprise. A bunch of folks have sent in the news that Utah's governor vetoed the video game retail bill that had zoomed through the legislature. State after state after state has passed similar laws, all of which have been thrown out by the courts as being unconstitutional. In this case, the law would have other unintended consequences, including that it gives incentive for stores to not have a policy on selling violent video games to minors -- because liability only comes in if they had a policy. Yet, many state governments continue to pass such laws, knowing that they're a waste of taxpayer money to defend, because they want to make it look like they're "protecting the children." That's why it's great to see the governor veto the bill while pointing out a clear recognition of how pointless it would be to pass the law:

While protecting children from inappropriate materials is a laudable goal, the language of this bill is so broad that it likely will be struck down by the courts as an unconstitutional violation of the Dormant Commerce Clause and/or the First Amendment.

The industries most affected by this new requirement indicated that rather than risk being held liable under this bill, they would likely choose to no longer issue age appropriate labels on goods and services.

Therefore, the unintended consequence of the bill would be that parents and children would have no labels to guide them in determining the age appropriateness of the goods or service, thereby increasing children's potential exposure to something they or their parents would have otherwise determined was inappropriate under the voluntary labeling system now being recognized and embraced by a significant majority of vendors.

Even the Salt Lake City Tribune is now trashing the legislature for pushing this bill forward and praising the governor for rejecting it:

Whew. Gov. Jon Huntsman rightly vetoed House Bill 353, which would have given voluntary media-industry ratings of movies, DVDs, video games, CDs and even books the weight of law and made sellers responsible for enforcing them.

Somehow, this misguided piece of legislation zoomed through the Legislature with hardly an opposing vote, and, we suspect, without a thorough vetting.... In their misplaced zeal to limit access to media they don't like, our legislators might have eliminated the very tools parents need to set limits on what their children see and hear. We dodged a bullet on this one. Having misfired badly, the Legislature should not bring it up again.

12 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Utah Allows Elected Official To Lobby... And Vote For Bill Her Company Is Pushing

from the utah-politics-at-work dept

Tim already covered some of the problems with Utah's repeated attempts to ban (or greatly limit) keyword advertising on trademarked terms. However, there were two separate disturbing issues related to this, both brought up by Eric Goldman, that seemed worth discussing. Both involve two of the legislators who voted on the bill. The first, Rep. S. Clark, voted against the bill, but for flabbergasting reasons. You see, it wasn't that he disliked the idea that companies would be blocked from advertising on competitive keywords, it was because he wanted to pin all the liability on Google:

"We should be going after the Googles that are creating this problem. They're the villains." .... "If we're going to use the strength and resources of the state to go after businesses, then we ought to go after the business that is causing the harm. ... We ought to go after the Googles with the state's resources and reputation."

Then, there's Rep. Jennifer "Jen" Seelig, who voted for the bill. But, that shouldn't be surprising. You see, even though she's an elected official in the state legislator, she's also still employed as a registered lobbyist for 1-800 Contacts, the company that has been pushing the bill. Apparently that sort of conflict of interest isn't seen as a problem in Utah.

27 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Mostly Toothless Video Game Bill Passes the Utah Legislature

from the where-are-the-regulations-against-silly-regulations? dept

The Utah legislature has seemed strangely obsessed with technology issues this session. Perhaps spurred on by a questionable BYU study on the problems created by video games, the Utah legislature has passed a bill promoted by disgraced lawyer and anti-videogame activist Jack Thompson to regulate the sale of video games to minors. The good news, as Ars Technica reports, is that the law was largely defanged during the legislative process. Under the final version of the bill, retailers would not be liable for selling M-rated video games to minors if they'd put their employees through a training program. They'd also not be liable if the children had gotten the games by lying about their age. With that said, there's still plenty to object to here. For starters, the legislation punishes retailers for failing to follow their published policy on video game sales. That means that a retailer that has a strong policy against selling to minors will face more liability if it breaks that policy than a retailer that doesn't have such a policy. This could have the perverse effect of discouraging retailers from adopting strong policies against selling violent video games to children. It will also force a lot of retailers to put their employees through "training" programs that may be completely unnecessary. But probably the most serious problem with this legislation is that it may be an opening wedge for future regulation of video game sales. Expect the same interest groups that pushed this legislation through to come back in future years with bills that would close the "loopholes" in this year's legislation.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

11 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Who Says Users Don't Want Competitors' Ads in Search Results?

from the complex-markets dept

A couple of years back we noted that the Utah legislature was considering legislation that would have banned companies from buying search ads related to their competitors' brand names. EFF and others said the law was likely unconstitutional, but the legislature passed it anyway. The legislation was such a disaster that last year the Utah legislature repealed it. Incredibly, despite all the negative publicity the 2007 bill received, and despite assurances from legislators that they'd learned their lesson, the backers of the legislation haven't given up. This year they introduced yet another bill restricting keyword advertising that passed the Utah House but died in the Utah Senate a few days ago. Given the tenacity of the bill's sponsors—1-800-Contacts is reportedly the leading backer of the proposal—the proposal may very well come back in future years.

Proposals to regulate keyword advertising have come in for a lot of criticism, but one person who's willing to defend the Utah proposal is Harvard's Ben Edelman. He argues that the Utah bill is necessary to avoid consumer confusion. He suggests that when consumers search for a trademarked term (say, "Hertz"), they're expecting to see search results related to that company, not to the company's competitors. He argues that if a consumer really wanted results from a variety of different companies, she would have chosen a generic term like "car rental" rather than a specific brand name. But James Grimmelmann points out a couple of problems with this reasoning. First, it shows an awfully low opinion of the intelligence of the average consumer. More importantly, there are circumstances where a consumer wants to see ads for a firm's competitors. For example, a consumer may be considering buying a particular company's products, but might want to check out that company's competitors before making her decision. Searching for that company's name is a quick and easy way to find out which other companies consider themselves to be in the same market. In contrast, the customer may not know which generic terms precisely describe that company's market. In Grimmelmann's example, it might be easier to ask for all companies in the same market as "Godiva" or "Hershey's", rather than having to describe precisely which segment of the chocolate market we're interested in.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

19 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Utah Law Proposed To Hide Police Misconduct So It Doesn't Get On YouTube

from the blame-the-victim dept

It's really fairly amazing to see how people react when bad activities are brought to light. A few times now, we've seen stories of students who were able to film inappropriate activity from teachers or principals with their mobile phones. Rather than recognizing the activity as whistleblowing, the schools in question responded by banning mobile phones. In other words, rather than fix the problem, the schools chose to cover it up so future problems wouldn't get exposed. It appears something along those lines may be happening on a larger scale in the state of Utah. After a video showing questionable police activity involving a taser showed up on YouTube, state senator Chris Buttars has introduced legislation that would allow police to withhold any reports concerning police misconduct from the public (found via Digg). That's because the whole reason the taser video made it to YouTube was because the victim filed a Freedom of Information Act request for it. So now, rather than deal with stopping police misconduct, it appears supporters of this legislation would simply prefer that no one knows about it. It might be worth noting that this comes at about the same time as new reports of a police officer suspended for inappropriate activity -- which was brought to light via YouTube.

21 Comments | Leave a Comment..