Kentucky
Loses
A few months ago, the state of Kentucky was making headlines
when they decided to threaten several online poker casinos with
taking over their domain names if they did not exit the market
by a certain deadline. The threats came from a judge who ruled
that that would be the punishment for those who decided to still
remain and operate within Kentucky. The state has since
attempted to seize over 100 domain names.
The latest development is that iMega, the Interactive Media
Entertainment and Gaming Association, which is the parent
company of several highly lucrative online poker websites,
decided to appeal the ruling, under the grounds that the initial
action was unconstitutional in the first place. iMega argued
that Kentucky doesn’t actually have that kind of authority in
the first place and therefore was fully invalid.
The Poker Players Alliance (PPA) Executive Director, John
Pappas, celebrated a victory today in what appears to be a
winning streak. Every decision counts these days in the fight
for online poker, since every legal action will set a precedent
for future decisions.
The next fight that the PPA is focusing on is the definition of
poker as a game of skill, which would directly exempt poker from
any gambling restriction law, such as the murky UIGEA.
Furthermore, the way that the government treats these decisions
also says a lot about the importance of protecting individual
freedoms, and how that measures up with several independent
agendas that might be government-driven.
This is merely another hurdle in the fight for the rights of
online poker players across America.
Back to
January 2009
Archive. |
|