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Comment by vleon42 | Hacker News Reader

I am torn actually unsure on what would be morally correct:

1. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike from my private property.

2. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike from my private property.

3. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike (eg: a previous patron who was violent) from my business.

4. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), should I not be allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike (eg: the next door restaurant employee who is copying my menu) from my business?

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Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale. Nobody really has an objection to organization blocking a single individual who is might cause trouble. But blocking an entire class of people is a) newly enabled* and b) much more harmful to society.

If a venue kicked out a lawyer who was actively working on a lawsuit against the venue, nobody would bat an eye. But kicking out every person on payroll at any firm that has a lawsuit against any venue in the parent company, the scale has now transformed this into a different thing.

The next step people worry about is that this same technology could be applied to more than just busniess you dislike. Why not block people who have disparaged your business on social media? Why not block people with poor credit scores or a criminal history?

So you could draw a line between (3) and (4), but you should also be adding

5. I, as a business owner, should I not be allowed to invent new ways to deny entry to entire categories of people.

* obviously blocking people on visual characteristics like skin color is already possible. And that is widely regarded as unacceptable!

Thanks, makes a lot of sense

> Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale. Nobody really has an objection to organization blocking a single individual who is might cause trouble. But blocking an entire class of people is a) newly enabled* and b) much more harmful to society.

So you're okay with the principle of denying individuals entry to a private business, but you're NOT okay with businesses enforcing this with technology? How does that make any sense?

You missed the point.

They're okay with the principle, AND they're okay with the technology, what they're NOT okay with is using the technology to microneedle and retaliate against tangentially innocent people.

The technology didn't decide to single the lawyer out, some manager or legal person did. It's not the tech that is wrong, it's the people's use of it.

eh, kind of both.

When you invent a hammer someone is going to use it to hit someone else over the head with it. It is an unavoidable foregone conclusion. Now, instead of a hammer in which society thinks they are useful and that anyone should have one, lets look at more controversial things like guns. In the US we tend to think everyone should have one, other countries tend to think the opposite, and are crime statistics reflect that.

And I would hold the same is true when it comes to 'business crimes'. The US will likely uphold that businesses can use advanced technology against the general public, and countries in the EU will more than likely prevent businesses from discriminating with it.

There is a reason we have laws regarding technologies. People will abuse them and the law is there to punish those who are abusers.

Rephrased:

So you're OK with countries using guns to conduct warfare, but you're NOT okay with countries using nuclear weapons? How does that make any sense?

Hopefully you can see the difference.

I'm saying there's a difference between blocking 10 people and 10,000, or 1 million. And I'm saying that technological change allows the latter, and we need to be cognizant of that when we decide what we're going to accept in society.

But I think the parents 4 questions are still an appropriate starting point for productive discussion. Are these rights that an individual or organization has? Technology is secondary.

If your answer is yes to all 4 is yes, the answer to 5 is also yes.

If your no or conditional to some of them, then you can discuss where the line should be drawn (e.g. numbers, characteristics, or technology allowed)

Curious why people react negative to this simple description of the debate. Anyone want to enlighten me?

The scale means we need to get the reasons to discriminate exactly right. This is society fracturing/shaping technology here.

We've struggled to get to the point where we can legally say "No discrimination vs skin colour/sex/sexual orientation etc etc".

Facial recognition AND being able to build your own Farley files for every individual means you can discriminate on any other factoid you want.

The obvious "No woke/lefties" or "No conservative/righties" lines are obvious drawcards but the filter could be about anything - however trite - with whatever timescale.

Did you say something negative on social media 10 years ago, about a flavour of chewing gum? You and everyone who liked/shared your comment are banned from that brand structure now!

Did the mother brand even own the brand you dissed at the time you made the comment? Irrelevant! Timescale for selection of candidates for banning AND implementation of ban is completely arbitrary too!

https://www.marketing91.com/brand-architecture/

I kinda get what he's saying and there isn't an easy answer. Things done bit by bit are often different than things done at large scale. Especially when automated by tech taking out the individual human element. The nuance between people making informed decisions vs algorithms dictating action off generalized heuristics can get muddy.

Just think of anonymized user data. Individually that info isn't really all that important, but taken at massive scale it can lead to worrying trends. Consider something like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

10 deaths are a tragedy.

1,000,000 deaths are a statistic

The two ideas are not incompatible. Consider that it’s much easier to drag and drop a list of faceless names and categories into a “Deny” list on a GUI, than it is to argue to a mother’s face that she cannot attend an even with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop because she happens to work at the same firm as some opposing lawyers. There is, or was, a higher cost associated to this action. Denying people access was OK back when you had to really care about it. The easier it gets, the more likely you are to exclude people that it just sounds like a good idea to exclude. The issue, of course, is that this leads to a world where your child gets excluded from playgrounds and theme parks because you had the wrong opinion on the Internet back in your 20s. Maybe you were too woke, or maybe you weren’t woke enough. We’d all be happy to forget about it after a few years, except that facial recognition databases won’t let you forget about it until the day you and all your progeny have died.

Who cares what technology they use? They could also check ids at the door and cross-reference their naughty list. Everything seems to involve an id check these days.

Maybe there's some contractual issue here - they sold you a ticket, that establishes a contract, they're breaking the contract by denying you entry. They should have performed the naughty check earlier in the process?

I think it's all pretty stupid but occupation isn't a protected class.

It matters because of scale. Our current laws and social norms are based on a world where it's not feasible to check against a list of 1,000,000 disallowed people. Technology now allows this, and we should re-assess whether our laws and norms should change with this new reality.

Obviously I think we should add some new checks. Perhaps every blocklist should be transparent and have an appeals process. Or maybe blacklisting should be time-limited. Or maybe expand the list of protected classes.

Agreed. For me, the issue is that this restriction is upheld at point of entry and not point of sale.

I get it’s a harder problem to restrict who tickets are sold to, but if a venue like that wants to get petty about who can attend their shows then the responsibility is on them to communicate that before the event.

To flip this another way, in any other normal circumstance, when you get banned from a venue you’d get a very clear communication telling you so. There is no ambiguity, you know you’re banned. Yet here the venue is still happy to take peoples money but doesn’t want to admit them. They’re basically having the best of both worlds.

I'm not sure why everyone is assuming she was denied a refund.

They won't be able to refund her missing out on spending time with her kid.

Well, I'm sure she was refunded or that would be another part of the suit.

Now, look at these 2 situations.

"Hello, I see you are buying this ticket, but since we're not going to let you enter we will prevent you from buying it"

is much different from.

"Hello, I see you got a baby sitter and took an uber to come down here and now we're refusing you access to a place you had a ticket for, on a reason you could not have possibly predicted"

There is an accrual of many other costs on the second one that are not refunded.

Of course, there is also the fact she entered as a group (girl scouts) and most likely was not the purchaser. To get group rates, many venues make you purchase all the tickets by one person.

> we're refusing you access to a place you had a ticket for, on a reason you could not have possibly predicted"

MSG claims to have notified the company twice.

Given the power imbalance here, I'm inclined to side with the individual refused entry. MSG can claim whatever they like. They refused access to an event open to the public to someone who was apparently unaware of their policy. It could easily have been that MSG communicated their intent poorly or not at all. It could also be that the law firm ignored them.

What MSG did was petty and doesn't make only them look bad. Given how iconic they are, to me, they make New York City look bad.

I'm not sure I'd ever want to visit MSG. I work for a well known subsidiary of a well know NYC-based company. Who knows, maybe I'll be on the list one day! I see something like this in the news and think I'm not missing much having never been to NYC. Clearly, MSG hasn't thought through the optics of this. Or, if they did, they think they're too big to need to care. I hope they have another think coming.

But unless you are familiar with all the properties of MSG you still don't know which place may or may not allow entry.

If google sends you an email saying you may not use any services provided by google - that's one thing. But what about Youtube? Is that owned by Google or Alphabet? Does Google being upset with you actually mean that all of Alphabet properties are out of bounds?

How much of a business needs to be owned by a corporation before they can ban you from it? 51%? 20%? 5%?

Should you get a letter from each and every business individually?

This is a crazy path to go down that would lead to the fracture of society.

They refused an individual not acting on behalf of their employer though. I'm not sure that notifying their employer is sufficient. If they want to bar an individual acting for themselves, they should have notified the individual.

In a lot of cases the face value of the ticket isn’t the biggest expense.

You can have travel costs, parking, lunch (whereas you’d otherwise cooked at home), possibly some time off work. And that’s before you touch on the emotional expense of being excluded from an activity you were looking forward to and which your friends and family were let into.

While these are all expenses that the patrons happily take on, that is under the assumption that they are allowed to enter the venue.

I know I’d feel pretty peeved at having gone through all of that for nothing. It just adds to the frustration of the day.

Yea how stupid.

Everyone in this thread has already recognized how many faces so far today with their eyes and nothing blew up?

Look at the personal computer? It is just a better place to hold your recipes. We basically live in 1980 + having a more efficient way to hold your cookie recipes instead of in cumbersome recipe books.

It's not that simple. Scale and ease of use matters. That is why when the government attempted to cross-reference the various administrative (mostly paper) files in a single database, around a single social security number, using a computer, it caused a huge scandal, the project was abandoned, and an independent regulatory agency was created in order to prevent something like this from happening again (and also deal with other data privacy issues).

To be fair, in the article, the venue management claims to have told the law firms involved about the ban well ahead of time:

“All impacted attorneys were notified of the policy, including Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which was notified twice," a spokesperson for MSG Entertainment said in a statement.

Whether or not that notice was in fact adequate, it seems like they’re at least sensitive to giving the impression that they communicated the ban very clearly ahead of time.

A theater ticket is not like booking with an airline. The venue doesn't assign a validated name to each seat. In this case it was likely one name for the entire batch of tickets in their group.

They're sold as non-refundable.* (Non-refundable by the buyer's request.. yes you can kind of take it to the resell market.. but now that's being invaded by the people who sold the ticket)

I’m aware of that, hence why I said it was a harder problem to solve.

> Who cares what technology they use?

As you say, they could accomplish the same thing by checking IDs at the door. Given the choice, I'd personally prefer an explicit ID check that I know is happening and is inconvenient for everybody rather than one that leaves me oblivious to the fact I'm being tracked and researched.

> They could also check ids at the door and cross-reference their naughty list.

They couldn’t, it seems impractical for an event of that scale.

Plus, it’s easier to bypass a door check or even convince the person doing the check to let you in.

This is in fact more practical than setting up face detection system, all you need to do is ID scanner and some simple OCR system to cross check the name on ID against blacklist, each person entering slaps ID against scanners (similar to how you do it with boarding passes at the airport or with public transit passes at gates), after one second either red or green light flashes. Shouldn’t take more than 5 seconds per person.

Here's how we know this isn't true: they evaluated how to do this at scale, chose facial recognition, and then implemented it successfully in a 6,000 person stadium.

Not because it's impractical to check IDs, but because facial recognition is less explicit and thus more easily "normalized".

That is not, in fact, how boarding passes at airports work. Identity checking is done by TSA, in a step that is very often the bottleneck and consumes enormous amounts of manpower and physical space.

That’s exactly how they work when you actually board the plane.

The thing they scan is your boarding pass.

They do not perform the ID checking, which because of varying forms of ID is a non trivial problem that they push back to the security lines.

>Who cares what technology they use?

A quantitative difference can create a qualitative difference. See all the discussions around cops tailing people in public when the laws were set during a time where that involved an actual officer following them the entire time, vs tossing a $20 dollar gps module on their car and being able to track the person at will

The technology isn't really important, but its what makes this possible. Without it, no one would do the alternative of employing dozens of people to look at faces and search them in record books of people they want to ban.

I'm also critical of the legal argument - too often in HN someone will about stuff that isn't illegal. My question is: so what? This is a forum for discussions, not a tribunal. We are not judging, we can argue that something is shitty, or that laws should be changed.

You can always refuse random ID checks. Of course the business still has the right to refuse service to you, but by law you don't have to ID yourself to random businesses.

Reminiscent of how things like license plate readers are legal, but maybe only because the legislators didn’t imagine a day when every person could be surveilled constantly, retroactively, everywhere.

It has not transformed into a different thing. It is the same thing it was before. A person can deny someone access to their private property. The law is not “A person can deny people access to their private property but only in slow inefficient ways…”

What if it was an inverse, say you could only enter a business if you are a member of X group? Now most of the planet is banned from your property except a small group of people that qualify for X, where X could be as specific as “straight white males”.

It seems to me, some people just want the idea of the law but not the enforcement of it. Probably for their own self interests, mainly: getting access to someone else’s cool private property.

You can't be against cancel culture but for all the tools that allow its implementation.

In most civilized countries including the US you couldn't put up a sign that said straight white males only. In the US you cannot discriminate based on protected classes including not not limited to Race, Religious belief, National origin, Age, Sex.

Ability to recognize and ban people at scale is absolutely a game changer whether you want to acknowledge it or not. It is not remotely "the same thing" because it allows previously impossible consequences and failure modes. You are thinking too small if you are considering only this silly show. This kind of feature is in many cases in theory commendable and logical but equally problematic.

Consider shoplifters an odious bunch if there ever was one. Were I a shopkeeper I would certainly want to keep a fellow that ran out with some goods from coming back and its only friendly to share such a naughty list with my fellows. Steal from one and find yourself unwanted all over town. What could go wrong?

What if I DID pay for the goods but I was incorrectly flagged? For instance came back in with my just paid for goods to get something I forgot and went out a different exit.

What if said flagged person now cannot reasonably obtain food or other critical resources? For instance more than a few private enterprise operate public transit resources and a huge portion of the US has exactly one ISP. For instance I work for one ISP and utilize another. If they banned people who work for the competition I would literally have to move.

What if the person did wrong 10 years ago and has turned their life around since? Computers never forget and communicate across jurisdictions.

What if flagging is used not to punish actual criminals but merely those we disagree with politically?

What if its used to punish those who write negative reviews or do too many returns. Statistically if our supply chain has a certain amount of broken trash and we serve millions of people a certain number are going to get a much higher than average number of broken things or have more than average bad experiences.

I for one have seen both return fraud and plenty of people who cause their own problems and then complain endlessly. Were I to operate a business I would kill for a way to eliminate such worthless customers. What about the collateral damage of those legitimately wronged?

Looking at your profile you complain about "cancel culture" but seem oblivious to the fact that cancellation is implemented either directly as a million decisions about one's own personal property OR preemptively based on vendors who are acting to protect themselves from those same decisions. What you are arguing for is the method for cancel culture to explode in the public sphere.

Do you really want to worry about writing an honest negative review, being mistaken for someone else, saying something controversial on the internet, revealing yourself as part of a group disliked by some, or subject to a database error and find yourself banned all over town? Do you want to talk to a drone who tells you the computer told him you can't come in and he can't fix it but you can talk to his equally useless manager who will tell you the same thing?

Here's a laugh for you. Lets suppose I took your comment wrong and decided your bit about straight white males was an indication of homophobia. I make no such implication herein but suppose I did and added you to a bigot list that was ultimately picked up not by a single bad list but a web of bad lists as maintained by multiple people who pick up and push their lists to other more pervasive lists like adblock lists.

You find shortly that you can neither buy a loaf of bread nor get a sandwich down the street from your house anymore because we have collectively decided that our "cool private property" is not for you. You find a way to get off one list 3 steps removed from the genesis of your discontent but are re-added later courtesy of a different list. Nobody will tell you why you are on their list nor even if you are they just tell you that you aren't welcome. You spend the next 5 years chasing ghosts never figuring out that a single post on hacker news is why you can't get that job you wanted.

Again you can't be against cancel culture but for all the tools that allow its implementation.

Imo it's fine if they can explain why and they're not discriminating against a protected class (or one that should morally be protected).

Obviously this woman should get her money back, and imo they should comp her for the pain/expense related to arranging her schedule/travel/lodging around this show since she wasn't denied at point of sale.

I just picture someone worrying about people dialing phone numbers while driving in the car in 1990? What a stupid thing to worry about since obviously the cord won't be long enough.

People aren't going to want to have a phone on them at all times anyway and risk possibly breaking or losing the phone. It will just hang on the wall like the rotary phone in a stand so you know where it is but you won't have to worry about the pesky cord anymore.

Technological progress is a linear process that is always good with zero higher order cultural effects based on how new features are used in practice.

Face recognition? What could possibly go wrong. I recognize faces literally every day!

While I'm not sure of the historical accuracy of the following article, well, many people should have realized that by the 90s.

https://thenewswheel.com/history-of-the-car-phone/

>>Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale

I actually don't see that as the key element at all - Doing something that is already legal, faster, doesn't make it illegal does it?

Why wouldn't it ? Speeding tickets being an obvious example.

The 1974 SAFARI scandal seems to be quite relevant here too :

https://www-lemonde-fr.translate.goog/blog/bugbrother/2010/1...

A cop can follow you on the public streets legally, recording where you go, who you talk to and want you say. But imagine drones cost 5cents, would we want the cops to be able to launch a drone to follow every single person every moment they are on a public street?

No, that would be a dystopia.

Technological change means the consequence of a law changes. And so perhaps a different set of laws achieves our societal values better in light of a change.

I can't help but wonder how they got the pictures of all the employees from this law firm? Perhaps headshots on the 'about us' section of the web site? I can't wait to see yet more legal disclaimers added to everything...

My guess is they used something like LinkedIN Sales Navigator to feed the MSG "no fly" list.

There are many markets where our face is just another data point for sale. At some point most of us have been ‘tagged in a photo’ whether we know it or not.

It’ll be interesting to see if MSG is forced to report the source they used as part of the legal proceedings.

But he isn't, though?

If I do not want X at my establishment, then what does it matter whether X is picked out of a single file line by a bouncer or picked out of a crowd by a security camera? I don't want them there. In what manner they showed up is irrelevant to me.

And you're comparing apples and oranges. This is a specific person who is a lawyer for a firm which is actively working against MSG, not some nebulous class of individual.

> This is a specific person who is a lawyer for a firm which is actively working against MSG

Has there been allegations that the firm or its partners/employees have acted maliciously with respect to MSG, or are they just representing a client within the standard scope of practice for the legal profession?

It doesn't matter. They're legally forbidden to ban classes of people from service. They're perfectly within their rights to ban specific groups because of actions they've taken against them.

>Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale.

What's your opinion about Facebook or Twitter blocking people? I'm pretty sure they block people using computer technologies, and that these technologies let them do it at scale.

I do think there should be limits to automated decision making by these companies. It doesn't necessarily mean "no blocking" though. For example Twitter and Facebook both have published rules and an appeals process, which is two steps in the right direction.

Another good example is Google Account suspensions. These seem to be for unspecified reasons with no appeal. Given the damage losing your google account does, I think its fair to expect more from that.

Generally speaking I'd like to see tech provides be some kind of common carrier - where they have an obligation to provide equal service. However one exception that I would make is automatic discovery (ie algorithmic feeds, recommendations etc). On the balance of common good I don't think users have a right to their posts being shown to users that don't follow them or whatever. (frankly I think algorithmic feeds are the root problem of social media).

The technology is just means to an end. Would you be ok if security had a big wall with printed pictures of undesirables and kicked her out due to this?

I wouldn't care as much, because that big wall would be purely symbolic and impossible to enforce.

What if you have to make a reservation and they check your name against an alphabetical book of blacklisted names?

Low-tech and easy to enforce.

Not so easy to enforce, because most ticketing systems don't require the name of every single attendee. Adding that requirement would be really really bad for the sales funnel, and also require tickets to be 100% non-transferable.

And much less disruptive to the target, because they get told in advance and don't drive and park and go in and plan only to get kicked out.

I don't think that was a question and it has nothing to do with enforceability.

Of course banning people based on where they work is bad for business.

You brought up enforceability, so I addressed that. The policy itself is also bonkers, I agree.

Not me, the parent I replied to ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34075624

But I think we are on the same page anyway

>Why not block people with [...] a criminal history?

Would be interesting to see the future where (almost) every business would refuse to deal with anyone with criminal record. Would we see lower crime rates if getting caught meant you basically couldn't function in society anymore? Or would that just spiral people who get a speeding ticket into mugging people for their groceries?

In terms of morality (as opposed to current law), I would argue #1 and #2 should be legally permitted, while #3 is inconsistent and #4 should not be permitted.

Basically, as an individual regarding your private property you have total control to discriminate freely. That's individual freedom. You're allowed to choose your own guests. (Note that if you're renting a room though, that becomes a business, so this no longer applies.)

Regarding #3, as a business owner, it's necessary to create policies to be able to ban individuals based on their relevant reasons that is set as policy, which includes past demonstrated misbehavior (e.g. violence). But not because you "dislike" them. Feelings don't matter, only relevant (non-arbitrary) policies do.

Similarly for #4, again feelings don't matter. No, a business should not be able to discriminate against people who work for or own competitors. (You can ban taking photos however, since that applies to everyone.)

Basically this is all predicated on a slippery-slope argument -- as soon as you allow bans for arbitrary "dislikes" rather than "relevant reasons", you're opening it up to racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. That's the immoral part. People's desire for equal accomodation from a business strongly outweighs a business owner's "dislikes", especially as a business owner is often the exclusive one providing a certain good in a certain area.

And so this case, I would strongly argue that banning employees of a law firm which is suing you from purchasing entertainment tickets is immoral. It's ultimately no different from a Democrat-owned business banning Republicans. It's nothing more than a "dislike".

Dislike has nothing to do with it.

You’re suing my restaurant because you claim a patron of mine was over served by a bartender and subsequently killed someone while driving drunk.

I do not want your lawyers or their investigators or staff coming in and chatting with my staff or poking around my business without my lawyer being there.

Then tell your staff not to chat and not let anybody poke around. The lawyers may order food but not walk into the kitchen, just like literally every other customer.

Frankly if you're running a public business then I don't care if you don't want lawyers there, the same as I don't care if you don't want people of another race there. If people are coming to eat and they're not being disruptive, then serve them, end of story. It's not your private home, it's a business open to the public.

> I do not want your lawyers or their investigators or staff coming in and chatting with my staff or poking around my business without my lawyer being there.

Which was not the case here. You can not summary ban every employee of a large company that's doing something you don't like.

Kelly Conlon is not involved in the case against MSG, and (as far as I understand) had no knowledge of the case.

> You can not summary ban every employee of a large company that's doing something you don't like.

Which laws forbid this?

I am not a lawyer, but the article contains the assertion that state liquor licensing law forbids it.

You're right, I was thinking generally, but the comment I responded to specifies "Which was not the case here."

Your private property is what it is, private.

Your business place, assuming a public business, is indeed that: a place open to the public by default.

In France (and, as far as I'm aware, most European countries), there is a very clear line: either your business place welcomes the general public, or it does not.

Once you fall in the first category - and, as soon as you're selling something in that business place, you are in that category - then you must have very strong arguments if you refuse to let a prospective customer in or even if you refuse to sell to a particular person the products or services that it is the purpose of your business to sell.

Those arguments usually boil down to either (i) some law preventing you to sell something to that prospective customer or (ii) that prospective customer actively disturbing the public order or presenting a high risk thereof (eg: they're a thief, they're drunk, they can't prove that they will be able to pay, ...). Of course there are provisions for specific settings, but which merely soften the (ii) to allow filtering on public safety grounds for places welcoming more than X simultaneous guests - including eg nightclubs and such.

Anything not in falling into these exceptions is just what it is: discrimination. And actually, this seems very sound to me. The fact you own a business puts you in the public world: you may not refuse to serve someone because you don't like them.

Running a business doesn't magically turn your place of business into public property. I run a home business. Does that mean the general public are free to enter and roam around my home office?

In the USA at least, you can kick out or ban anyone you want from your business for any reason, unless it is one of a very small enumerated list of disallowed reasons including race, religion and so on. If I don't want people wearing green shirts in my store I can kick/keep them out. I'd be an asshole, but I am 100% allowed to do that.

>> there is a very clear line: either your business place welcomes the general public, or it does not.

> I run a home business. Does that mean the general public are free to enter and roam around my home office?

So you're in the second case. What's complicated about this?

I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike (eg: a previous patron who was violent) from my business.

Actually, no. At least in New York State. While you can ban someone for the "violent" offense you picked, you cannot "deny entry to persons [you] dislike."

The victim in this case, being a lawyer, is taking the clever and lawyerly route with this:

Davis is now upping the legal ante, challenging MSG’s license with the State Liquor Authority.

"The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat," said Davis.

> being a lawyer

That's the thing that gets me. I get the desire to retaliate against people you feel have wronged you somehow, but as an actual strategy it seems like playing games like this with lawyers invites more trouble than it's worth. If they're trying to collect evidence, they will just send in an uninvolved third party to do it, not go themselves. But by attacking them personally, now they're going to use their legal skills to give you a headache.

Which is pretty unfavourable for the world.

Any other occupation isn't allowed to use their occupation to retaliate

Any other occupation isn't allowed to use their occupation to retaliate

Sure they do. It happens all the time. Politicians do it. Food service workers. Tradesmen.

One place I worked pissed of a local plumber's union, and guess what — a week later the city condemned the sewer pipe leaving the building. Once we made up with the union, the city magically changed its mind.

She’s not illegally “retaliating”. MSG wants to ban her so they must forfeit the liquor license. She is pointing out the rules of a license that MSG is violating. What’s wrong with that? MSG could forfeit it and keep her banned and all is square.

If the liquor license really limits who can be denied service, then I don't consider this to be retaliation.

By analogy, if a lawyer is denied entry because they are black and they sue, that isn't retaliation it is just requiring the business to follow the law. If a lawyer is denied entry for some legitimate reason (say drunk and belligerent), and they dig up some other unrelated offense to sue about (while ignoring the hundreds of other establishments with the same minor offense), then that is retaliation.

>you cannot "deny entry to persons [you] dislike."

I think that's 100% legal, even in NYS. You can't deny entry based upon membership in a protected class, but other than that, you can't be forced to serve someone!

Apparently you do, if the liquor license you agreed to requires it.

They shouldn't have taken legal obligations to do otherwise, i.e. they shouldn't have sold the ticket and shouldn't have applied for liquor permit.

"Yes, we took your cash in return for promise of delivering goods and services, but our policy forbids us from delivering" sounds more like Rule of Acquisition.

Given she was there with a Girl Scouts troop she probably hadn't given her name to MSG and the tickets were probably bought as a large group. Also do we know if they refunded the ticket I don't remember seeing that said either way when I read it.

Tough shit. People can resell things they own, like for example tickets, so assuming she and her daughter obtained tickets legally (directly or indirectly, I have no reason to doubt they did, though I don't know for sure), by that act she was already given explicit permission to enter the venue and remain there for the duration of event.

If they don't like it, they can sell named tickets, and BTW since Girl Scouts are known for being vicious hooligans, maybe they should have instituted football-like regime up to and including stadium bans for their mothers.

#4 could (and almost certainly would) be used for broadly awful reasons. For example, “I’m not discriminating against minorities! I just don’t want to serve anyone who’s worked in a chicken processing plant.”

IMO, your right to deny people entry to your private property should end once you take their money for tickets to enter. After all, it's not like she bought her ticket under a fake name.

This is an important distinction with “deny access to business”. They already took her money, now they’re denying their end of the contract.

What if you didn't take their money and they bought a ticket via 3rd party, as is often the case?

Then you should have required the 3rd party to provide a list of names at the time of purchase.

The difference is the scale of the Madison Square Gardens business. You could argue that they have a sort of monopoly power that holds them to a different standard than the typical business.

> 1. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike from my private property.

If you were not letting other, strangers, in for money. (Unsure if "for money" matters) then you are not, or should not, be so allowed.

If you are in trade than (in civilised jurisdictions) you cannot refuse to trade with a person because of prejudice and/or bigotry.

To me its pretty straight forward because this is how social credit systems start.

This is a slippery slope.

Facial recognition matched with digital currencies is a real serious problem.

No, you should not be allowed as a business to deny entry, or deny service, or deny product to a person/entity you do not "like" or a person who is associated with someone/entity you do not "like".

If you removed a person from your business because of something they did, then denying them subsequent business is an extreme measure and will most likely not hold unless there is language in laws that you can use, like violent activity, criminal behavior, etc.

The less dramatic version of 2 is a bouncer saying "no, you're friends with Bob, and Bob always causes trouble."

Except that you're not standing in the queue to be processed by the bouncer, but you have a valid ticket, which they sold to you.

Venues should be required to refund tickets if a person is denied entry provided they weren't previously told they were banned from the venue.

If you buy a ticket, you can't just unilaterally decide that you don't feel like going after all and get a refund. Why should the seller get to do the equivalent?

The law firm were notified prior (2x) that employees would not be allowed entry to MSG. Having been so warned, she bought a ticket and tried to go.

After having been warned and then being prevented from going in, her response is to sue them again.

I don't think notifying her firm is good enough. She should have to be notified individually, directly, and provably for them to get out of refunding the ticket.

It wasn't entry to MSG, but entry to radio city music hall which is owned by MSG. It's not clear how obvious the warning was.

If they have the tech to identify everyone individually they don't want going to their venue, then it's on them to notify everyone individually ahead of time. Otherwise, refund + expenses.

Your premise is a little off. This is not exactly private property, but a public accommodation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_U.... That is why MSG likely has to meet ADA accessibility construction standards, among other things. Different laws apply when you invite the general public into your property.

The law is like code. If you say, "persons I dislike" but you mean people of color, you have Jim Crow, which is deeply immoral. On they other hand, your point #3 is clearly valid. To resolve this, 42 U.S.C. §2000a talks about protected classes (https://www.justice.gov/crt/title-ii-civil-rights-act-public...). People with good and bad intentions have been arguing ever since then about what is a public accommodation and who belongs to protected classes. In this case, even if it's legal, MSG is not being terribly smart to 1) use dystopian technology to enforce bans 2) be petty and expansive about banning people 3) do so against a now-very-angry legal expert.

Honestly I think the biggest free speech issue is their grounds for excluding her. And perhaps a violation of the 4th amendment too. Not because of cataloging her face but by abusing their authority to retaliate against people for exercising due process. What if law firms struggle to hire for fear of being blacklisted for indirectly participating in lawsuits? It will make it that much harder to seek redress in courts.

Change "dislike" to "actively works against you".

But, even if she did work on cases again the company, would attending an event have to do anything with the court disputes?

Eh, I take that as a very bad take.

Lawyers work for their clients, and in the vast majority of cases are not personally invested deeply in the case (except when you do dumb crap like in the article). They request evidence via the court, they do not go gather it themselves. If further on site evidence is needed by non-standard methods a PI will show up at the location, and if they are any good will never be noticed. By banning the lawyers they are either petty, or they feel they are still involved in some kind of potentially illegal activity and need to reduce risk. Not a good look.

I think if a business is the beneficiary of a number of public subsidizes and allowances, then they lose a lot of that discretion.

This is less of a problem if when public places aren't private property, but we still have the second part of the problem: can one be forced to do business with someone one doesn't want to. It seems like in this case, she was already sold a ticket, so that seems to be a moot point on this particular case.

Another take: personal information is valuable, it belongs to the individual concerned with some fair use exceptions, making electronic files with said personal information in a way that obviously harms the individuals concerned infringes on their most personal intellectual property and is not fair use.

Facts however are not generally protected though which is what most of this is about. That's why map makers include non-existent cities so there's something other than just facts involved in their product.

Depends on the jurisdiction. Facts that happen to be personal information are very much protected in the EU.

We don't allow public accomodations to discriminate against protected classes. We have made a decision that some kinds of discrimination is immoral, and rightly so. As it gets easier to make discriminatory decisions on objectionable basis, we may well decide that to expand this rule.

In the US, at least, there are restrictions on 3. You can’t deny entry to black people, for example, just because you don’t like black people.

You can, however, deny employment to Dalits, and Oracle argues that it's Just Fine because there's no law.

How is that not an obvious protected class? It should easily fall under the national origin qualifications.

> It should easily fall under the national origin qualifications.

How? Dalits aren't from Dalitland.

Because the definition seems like it would apply. "person's birthplace, ancestry, culture or language" [0]

It'll come down to a judge, but it doesn't seem like a stretch to put a caste group under that umbrella.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/crt/federal-protections-against-nati...

I would think race fits better.

But we'll just have to watch cases like https://thewire.in/caste/cisco-case-caste-discrimination-sil... to see whether the courts agree with us that caste discrimination should be illegal in America. (And if the courts disagree, time to lobby the politicians...)

A reminder : still using "race" like it's still the 18th century (up to the 1950s?) and like it's still a valid scientific concept effectively makes the US government a promoter of racism :

https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...

The postmodern term is "ethnicity" (which does get mentioned in your article), with the understanding that it's overwhelmingly about culture, and while genetics do matter in very specific cases (like for lactose tolerance), typically they matter very little, and your ethnicity is something that you can change (though it gets ever harder after your teenage years).

P.S.: I really don't know enough about "caste" and its history to comment on that, though the ancestry issue doesn't look good.

(One thing that has been bugging me for a while is how the number of our ancestors grows exponentially with each generation - at least before inbreeding starts to dominate - which seems like any of those ancestry-based discriminations are just arbitrarily stopping at some convenient for them point/in complete coverage, and can basically make up excuses about discriminating against you or not. But I guess that I shouldn't be surprised about it when totalitarian regimes do it : the fear of the arbitrary is a powerful weapon they have, and so it's likely on purpose !)

> How is that not an obvious protected class?

Basically because it wasn't on the radar of American legislators when they wrote up the lists of protected classes.

The restrictions in question come from the Civil Rights Act. Which sets a bunch of protected classes, including race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

See https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196....

However federal law does not prevent discriminating on other grounds. Such as political affiliation or profession. For example landlords can choose not to rent to lawyers, and every so often someone gets fired for political views.

State law may disagree. And her liquor license trick is an example of how.

>>However federal law does not prevent discriminating on other grounds. Such as political affiliation or profession. For example landlords can choose not to rent to lawyers, and every so often someone gets fired for political views.

I know more than a few MD's that refuse to see lawyers as patients - can't say I blame them.

It's more complicated than that. You can't deny entry to black people as a public venue. But you can set up a members-only club that does not allow black people to be members, and then sell exclusively to the membership - which is still a business.

5. Block people who are likely to have a medical emergency at your business.

It should be noted that (3) is not true. You cannot deny entry to black people because you are a racist, for instance. You can deny someone who was previously violent, for the violence. Not because you dislike them.

This is similar to

5. I, as a government, can lock up people who engage in behaviors I dislike (e.g. because they were violent.)

6. I, as a government, can lock up people who are affiliated with groups I dislike (e.g. political groups not in power)

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