Kiwiblog

The Herald has an interesting story on a ruling by Judge David Harvey:

The poker news websites went wild. “New Zealand Court Backs Poker” proclaimed gamblingonlinemagazine.com. “In a groundbreaking ruling a New Zealand court has delivered a huge blow to opponents of online poker, and poker in general,” said pokernewsboy.com.

“Though they may be an ocean away, the nation of New Zealand has fired a shot which could reverberate through the poker landscape,” said flopturnriver.com.

What they were all raving about was a ruling District Court Judge David Harvey delivered on June 23 which found that advertisements for Pokerstars.net and the Asia Pacific Poker Tour run on TV3 and C4 were not promoting online gambling.

The Department of Internal Affairs, which brought the case, has said it will appeal the decision.

The details of the case are interesting. Essentially pokerstars.net is a play money gambling site (which is legal) and pokerstars.com is a proper gambling site (which can not be promoted under NZ law). DIA argued that by advertising one, they were advertising both, essentially.

A feature of the case was the difference between the “dot net” and “dot com” Pokerstars websites. The .net site is for practise poker games using “play money”. The .com site has online poker with gambling for real money. A key plank of Internal Affairs’ case was that the use of the generic word “Pokerstars” in both the.net and .com domain names were two ways of saying the same thing. “It is the prosecution case,” says the judgment, “that the advertisements were de facto advertisements for pokerstars.com, using and emphasising the brand name ‘pokerstars’.”

I’m sceptical of that argument.

Judge David Harvey is widely regarded as New Zealand’s most technologically savvy judge. Appointed to the bench in 1988 he serves in the District Court holding warrants for general, jury and Youth Court jurisdictions. A former chair of the Copyright Tribunal, he lectures part-time in law and information technology at the University of Auckland, has been involved in the introduction of information technology for the Judiciary since 1990, and is the author of internet.law.nz – Selected Issues. A former international Mastermind champion (his speciality was J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings), he writes widely on law and internet topics, is currently completing a PhD and has been active in making submissions on our laws relating to copyright and legislating against spam.

I first met Judge Harvey through the old Internet newsgroups on Usenet. He qualifies as a genuine geek

This time around Judge Harvey appears to have taken an important lesson from his earlier mis-step – that judges must always make the reasons for their decisions abundantly clear. His judgment extends to 47 pages. It’s also New Zealand’s first digital judgment – a 9MB “PDF” digital document, complete with embedded video of the advertisements in question. It sits in the court file, not on paper, but on a CD.

Heh that is quite cool – an embedded video in a court judgement. A pity it does not appear to be online on the decisions of public interest site.

In response to the evidence of prosecution expert witness Professor Sarah Todd, a professor of marketing, Judge Harvey said he had concerns about the basis of her assumption – that there was a high chance those intending to go to the free pokerstars.net site, may in fact, end up on the pokerstars.com by accident. “Internet addresses are unforgiving of errors. A mistake in one letter of a domain name may produce a nil result or may direct a user to a completely different website.”

He then pointed out the sort of mistake suggested involves typing three wrong letters and seemed to overlook the fact the advertising was directed to online poker sites, anticipating an audience with some familiarity in the use of computers and the internet.

The judgment also goes through each of the advertisements – and provides the videos so that people reading the text can see for themselves what was being advertised. The web address shown in each advertisement is always pokerstars.net and often includes the words “this is not a gambling website” or “play for free”. In some of the ads, professional poker players are linked to popular sports – Noah Boeken plays soccer, Daniel Negreanu hockey and Isabelle Mercier boxes. Their commentaries include lines like, “Practise for free at the world’s largest poker site, pokerstars.net and find the pokerstar in you.”

Looks a very reasonable decision to me. Finding TV Works guilty for promoting a legal website on the basis it has a similar name to a website that can not be legally promoted, would set in my opinion an unhealthy precedent.

The NZ Herald calls for a temporary fix for Queens Wharf.

Three options released yesterday by the Minister for the Rugby World Cup, Murray McCully, provide alternatives for this. The cheapest, at $23.9 million, involves removing the ugly sheds from the wharf and creating a temporary village. The two others, at $27.2 million and $31.3 million, envisage the sheds being refurbished for the “party”. That represents no choice at all, given the sheds will remain an embarrassing eyesore no matter how much they are tarted up. They must go.

The Press is concerned about Iran. I doubt the feeling is mutual

This week the bellicose Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, defied a string of United Nations sanctions resolutions and ordered the firing up of dozens of centrifuges to greatly increase his country’s output of enriched uranium. Although the product these facilities will produce is only to a level needed to run nuclear power stations and is not of sufficiently high grade to create nuclear weapons, it is a crucial technical step up in Iran’s nuclear programme. Having mastered the techniques required to produce this material, the next step to create weapons-grade material is a relatively simple one. And almost no-one believes Iran’s repeated denials that it intends eventually to take that next step. …

Iran with nuclear weapons, or military action to prevent it getting them, are highly undesirable alternatives. But if the world wants to avert them diplomacy must not be allowed to fail.

I think it pretty much already has failed.

The Dominion Post rails against pokie machines:

Gamblers pump about $1 billion a year into machines in pubs, RSAs and sports clubs. Of that, about a third finds its way back to the community via gaming trusts. (The rest is consumed by the Government, in the form of taxes, as well as by pubs and clubs and the gaming machine trusts.)

The majority of machines are concentrated in lower socio-economic areas. Newtown, for example, has 72. Khandallah, Thorndon, Kelburn and Wadestown have none. However, the proceeds are distributed evenly across communities. That means the people who frequent gaming machines in poorer neighbourhoods are subsidising the sporting and cultural pursuits of their neighbours in wealthier parts of town.

For this reason, and many others, tentative Wellington City Council proposals to gradually lower the number of machines in five “areas of concern” – Tawa, Johnsonville, Miramar, Karori and Newtown – are welcome.

I disagree. Gambling is effectively a tax on stupidity. the left always go on about how we should tax bad things more. Well stupidity is a bad thing, and if the taxpayer and community groups can make money from stupid people, then that is fine with me – so long as there is total transparency about odds – ie people know that over time they are almost certain to lose money.

The ODT looks at Sarah Palin:

Her popularity is as baffling as it is perhaps frightening to liberal intellectuals, Democrats – and, some suggest – to old-school Republicans whose most fervent wish is to retake the White House in 2012 and who fear her potentially divisive influence on the party. …

She may embody all the colourful hyperbole and grammatical integrity of a hastily penned country and western anthem, but down-home, emotive, illogical, God-fearing and at times disturbingly ignorant, she epitomises a certain cross-section of the electorate.

As such Mrs Palin is a potentially powerful influence on the future course of US politics.

Mainstream political forces will continue to dismiss her at their peril.

She may of course self-destruct at some stage. What will be interesting is how many GOP candidates ask her to appear with them in the mid-terms in November.

The Dom Post reports:

A developer’s plan to build a casino in Wellington appears doomed after Internal Affairs Minister Nathan Guy ruled out a law change required for it to proceed.

Backers of the proposed billion-dollar project in Shelly Bay – which also includes a luxury apartment block and a gondola at the prime harbourside site – need the previous government’s moratorium on new casinos lifted if the centrepiece of the development is to go ahead.

But Mr Guy, who has responsibility for gambling, said changing the law was not in the pipeline and, even if it was, doing so would be a lengthy process.

“Any change to the law would be a decision for the Cabinet and caucus and would require extensive discussion with the wider community,” he said.

“At this stage, the Government has no plans to change the law.”

That’s a real shame. It is bizarre that the Government thinks Wellingtonians can not be trusted to have a casino.

I don’t think there should be any limit on the number of casinos. There should be rules around how they operate, but I don’t see it as the role of the state to determine which cities or towns are allowed one, and which are not.

I’ve just blogged at curiablog, on a morality poll by UMR. Respondents were asked how morally acceptable (or unacceptable certain activities were. Below is the morally acceptable score for each activity and the net acceptable score (acceptable less unacceptable)

From most to least acceptable, they were:

1. Divorce 81%, +68%
2. Sex outside marriage 77%, +59%
3. Having baby outside marriage 71%, +48%
4. Stem cell research 63%, +38%
5. Homosexual relations 61%, +29%
6. Euthanasia 55%, +18%
7. Abortion 55%, +21%
8. Gambling 52%, +10%
9. Animal medical testing 52%, +12%
10. Wearing or buying fur 48%, +4%
11. Death Penalty 43%, -7%
12. Animal Cloning 27%, -40%
13. Suicide 20%, -48%
14. Married people having affairs 13%, -70%
15. Polygamy 11%, -74%
16. Human cloning 7%, -81%

Now this was asking about moral acceptability, not legality. So while only 55% think abortion is morally acceptable, that doesn’t mean only 55% think it should be legal.

Now what would my answers have been. None of the first ten I would regard as morally unacceptable. I do regard the death penalty as unacceptable – not keen on states being able to kill it citizens. Tend to regard suicide as morally unacceptable in most circumstances but not all (ie terminally ill). While generally I think it is not a good idea for married people to have affairs (and if married I would not), I’m wouldn’t label it as morally unacceptable as it is between those two people. I don’t think polygamy should be legal but nor do I regard it as morally unacceptable. And finally I don’t believe human cloning is automatically morally unacceptable.  I favour very very tight restrictions on it, but think there are potential benefits.

So bottom line is there is very little I believe is always morally unacceptable. Mainly just the death penalty really.

I’m sure very few here will agree with me!

Is there nothing the Fun Police don’t want to stop or restrict?

On the day of a record $26 million Big Wednesday Lotto draw, gambling counsellors are calling for a lower limit on lottery jackpots.

Problem Gambling Foundation chief executive Graeme Ramsey wants the $30 million cap on jackpots – doubled from $15 million in 2005 – to be cut to $12.5 million, which is below the level at which the public usually gets excited.

Oh yes we can’t have people getting excited.

If you accept the notion that because a very small minority of people have a problem with an activity, then everyone should be prevented from taking part in an activity – well we end up with a sterile society.

But the Lotteries Commission appears happy to see jackpot limits go even higher.

In a November briefing paper to then Internal Affairs Minister Richard Worth, the commission said it was looking into joining a proposed “world lottery” headed by Britain’s National Lottery.

“It is very likely that participation would entail lifting the current $30 million prize limit set on our games,” the paper said.

Great. There should be no limit. So long as there is transparency over the odds of winning, we should be able to have as big a prize pool as people want.

And while we are at it, why does the state have a monopoly in Lotto?

The Press reported this morning:

The Redwood home could be yours for a little more than $100, despite its rating value of $594,000.

The most the lucky buyer will pay is $1100.

Real estate agent Brad Maxwell and wife Janice own the Redwood property through a family trust and are selling it through a new sales method they hope will catch on.

Would-be buyers will book a seat at an internet auction for $100 each, with the lowest unique bid between 1c and $1000 getting the house.

The Maxwells have ensured they will not lose out on the deal. They have calculated that selling between 5000 and 6000 seats will bring in what they want for their home, and only then will the online auction run.

The DIA pointed out, this was illegal in several ways:

However, Internal Affairs gambling compliance manager Debbie Despard said today this was illegal gambling.

Despard said under the Gambling Act 2003 the auction was illegal in several ways.

“There is a huge element of chance in this so-called auction in which people pay to participate,” Despard said.

“It is also online gambling, which the Act defines as ‘remote interactive gambling’.”

Gambling with prizes exceeding $500 can only be conducted by societies raising money for authorised charitable purposes, she added. But this sales scheme was being conducted by a private person for personal profit and could not be licensed.

“Participating in illegal gambling is a criminal offence,” said Despard.

Furthermore, any sale and purchase agreement stemming from the auction would be on shaky ground because the Gambling Act says contracts relating to illegal gambling are illegal for the purposes of the Illegal Contracts Act.

Internal Affairs had advised the Trade Me and Premier Realty that the proposed sales method was illegal and was also contacting the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand.

DIA do a good job in educating people on the law. They’ve given me some helpful advice from time to time.

Having said that, our gaming laws are very restrictive and it would be great if the Government reviewed them with an eye towards permitting more gaming, so long as there is adequate transparency around the games.

I have problems with the TAB having a monopoly over sports betting, and the restrictions on online gaming which are more onerous than Australia.

But these are issues for the Government and ultimately Parliament.

The Greens and other wowsers need to get real over the move to online Lotto.

If people want to gamble online, they are already doing it. Hell people in NZ are betting on US elections, playing blackjack, roulette etc etc.

All the Government is doing it allowing people to buy Lotto tickets on the Internet.  That’s bloody helpful.  They’ve even put in place spending limits.