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Copyright 2005 WJLA/NewsChannel 8
December 5, 2005
HEADLINE:
Murky Law Makes Poker Website A Legal Gamble And Bars Us Residents
Body:
The LA Times reports today that while American players drive the
$2.4-billion online poker
market, but the profits they generate flow overseas to the foreign
companies that dominate the business.
Now, Los Angeles-based WPT Enterprises Inc., whose televised
World Poker Tour helped touch off the poker craze, wants a piece
of that pot - and to get it the company has ventured into uncharted
legal territory. From its Wilshire Boulevard offices across from
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, WPT has quietly launched
an overseas gambling website that it believes will flourish even
though the rules of the game are stacked against it.
WPT bars U.S. citizens, an estimated 80% of its potential customer
base, from its Europe-based WPTonline.com poker site. The company
has no desire to rile the Justice Department, which considers
it illegal to accept online bets from U.S. residents on sports
and casino games other than horse racing.
Even with that precaution, however, WPT appears to be taking
a "calculated risk," said David S. Levine, residential
fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.
"All of the law in this area is pretty unsettled," Levine
said. "If you're engaged in this activity, you're really
making a bet yourself as to what the law is and what authorities
will do."
So far, the Justice Department has not brought any cases against
online poker players or the companies that take their money. A
Justice Department spokesman in Washington declined to comment
on WPT but said companies couldn't presume that what they were
doing was legal just because their customers weren't U.S. citizens.
"Existing state and federal statutes cover many forms of
Internet gambling," said the spokesman, Paul Bresson. "It
is the position of the Department of Justice that online
gambling activity occurs both where the gambling business
is located and where the bettor is located."
Scholars call online gambling law murky, however, because most
of the relevant federal statutes, including the 1961 Wire Communications
Act, were written long before the Internet era.
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