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Online Poker News Archives - December 5, 2005

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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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