Lawyers barred by Madison Square Garden found a way back in
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That being said, it does not seem like facial recognition technology is the issue here, at all.
The crux of the matter appears to be this:
> Businesses generally have the right to decide whom they want to do business with, as long as they are not discriminating by ethnicity, sex, religion, disability or another protected class.
This seems to be the issue that people are fundamentally disagreeing with. Facial recognition technology is one way of achieving that. If the venue just had all security guards carry a list of the lawyers' photographs, instead of using automated technology, would people be fine with the venue barring access?
Essentially it seems to me like people are disagreeing with the fact that businesses can choose to not to business with unprotected classes. If so, that's fine, but I don't understand why people are just couching this as an attack on facial recognition technology, which seems like in this instance is actually doing its job well.
The article ends with:
> Lawyers may not be the most sympathetic victims and their need to be entertained may not be the most compelling of causes. But their plight, Mr. Greenberg said, should raise alarms about how the use of this technology could spread. Businesses, for instance, might turn people away based on their political ideology, comments they’d made online or whom they work for.
But again...."Businesses, for instance, might turn people away based on their political ideology, comments they’d made online or whom they work for" with or without the use of facial recognition technology, so the fundamental issue appears to be that businesses _shouldn't_ be allowed to turn away unprotected classes?
I think you're right in that people aren't upset with facial recognition per se, but are upset with its efficiency.
However the best way to counteract that at this time is to push for a ban on the technology instead of a ban on the consequences, because enumerating all possible consequences now and in the future is hard.
However, I think the difference between automated image recognition and security guards with clipboards is one of scale. It would simply be impossible to have images of lawyers from across 90 firms on clipboards and would take long enough to be infeasible for every single patron coming through the doors. Automation makes this possible and easy and thus it’s worth having the discussion.
It’s like Google with self driving cars. While they were technically on public roads, the breadth and scale of PII being captured and displayed changed what was acceptable. Hence Google choosing to instead deploy automated algorithms to blur faces.
I agree with OP that this is the only reason we're even talking about facial recognition here. Most people are fine with a business kicking someone out that they don't want to do business with. Trust me, we would not want to live in a world where you can't kick someone out of your business. But when the kicking becomes scalable and automated, some people have second thoughts about being fine with this. It's interesting to see people double-check and backtrack their world views when the world becomes automated.
Can you elaborate on this please? It's not immediately obvious to me that's a bad thing (within reason). I'm not talking about removing all ability nor about all businesses. I'm specifically talking about a severely restricted ability - you can kick people out of a public venue if they're being disruptive, causing a public nuisance of some kind, or not following the publicly posted rules for the venue that you are clearly enforcing evenly. But other than that, you can't just evict people. You also obviously need to make it a crime to hire people to harass the people you dislike to provide cover under the pretense of kicking both parties out which is what will happen with such a policy.
Then you have people who are not disruptive themselves, but you know their presence will invite others who are. The whole "How to not become a nazi bar" example[1].
EDIT: Rules-lawyer example: Do you really want this guy[2] in your store? "Ackshually, it's 8:59 and you close at 9:00!"
1: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...
2: https://www.tiktok.com/@ragnar_helsson/video/718540983685770...
I feel like you're really strawmanning here. I wasn't trying to lay out the exact parameters of the law. See a sibling response to you:
> To the best of my knowledge - this is the case in big chunk Europe, with a "for no reason" added on the end. You can't kick out someone out of business unless they are actively malicious. And no, working for a company that is suing an owner is not considered malicious.
Believe it or not, but that's the whole point of the judge in the legal system. It's to act as the arbiter of are you acting with accordance of the spirit of the law or are you engaging strictly in trying to get as close to the line as possible. And if you show a pattern of acting in bad faith, you get slapped with extra penalties. The American legal system seems to generally prefer "nyaa nyaa, I'm not technically touching you!" interpretations of the law but in reality this kind of interpretation only makes sense in a ridiculously small (if any) set of circumstances - in most others it's better to just let the judge interpret the evidence, figure out who's acting in bad faith (whether through summary judgement or jury if it's really required), and judge accordingly.
As for the closing hours things, that's again a strawman. The business is free to close whenever as long as it's applying this uniformly (i.e. preventing all new public access, trying to get existing public to exit etc). That has nothing to do with ejecting specific individuals selectively.
To the best of my knowledge - this is the case in big chunk Europe, with a "for no reason" added on the end. You can't kick out someone out of business unless they are actively malicious. And no, working for a company that is suing an owner is not considered malicious.
This is exactly what it is. There's a non-trivial cost associated with banning someone the "old fashioned" way and it creates a barrier to abuse. It's hard to maintain lists forever and it's hard to share lists because the more people on the list, the more it costs.
There are so many abuses that become viable once the process is low cost and highly scalable that I can't imagine it being left unchecked.
What if all the hospitals are private like in the US and they all share the same ban list? Should they be able to ban you for wearing a green shirt?
https://www.cms.gov/regulations-and-guidance/legislation/emt...
why should you be able to kick out all patrons who wear green shirts? is that not against the spirit of offering a public accommodation?
even if your goal is to enforce a dress code, surely that can be done in a "content-neutral" manner similar to the "time, manner, place" regulations.
similarly to the "constitutional fetishism" in the US, where people dig in their heels defending really awful features and design goals of the system, people often really fail to stop and consider the difference between the way the system is and the way it ought to be. Being banned from public society en-masse by a privately-operated "social credit" system is pretty horrible even if it's perfectly legal under the current law!
but it wasn't feasible to do that en-masse back in the 1700s, so nobody wrote a law preventing it, just like one cop could watch traffic in 1780 means that it's legally fine to build a massive database recording everyone's movements in the 2020s...
Sure, I definitely see that. What I am having a hard time understanding is what, then, are people who are against the use of facial recognition in this case but are not against businesses being able to bar access to unprotected cases in general, arguing here, exactly? That businesses should be allowed to bar as many people as they can manually?
Basically the position that "businesses shouldn't use tech to help them bar people, but should still be able to bar people" seems confusing to me, because then obviously bigger businesses like MSG can still do even manual barring 'at scale' (e.g. hire more security guards and distribute lists of barred individuals across them) that small businesses wouldn't be able to do, etc...
It's a combination of things. The high scalability and lower cost make it much easier to ban people. Big companies are already demonstrating they're willing to ban people for unreasonable things and the continual reduction in competition between businesses means people that get banned have fewer alternatives, so being banned is a much bigger deal than it used to be.
Take it to an absurd extreme and imagine if you walk into a store where they have facial recognition identify you, look up your bank account balance, and decide you don't have enough money to be worth letting in. The potential profit is less than the average cost of serving someone from your demographic, so it makes business sense to refuse service.
The venue matters too. There probably wouldn't be a lot of complaining if a Rolex store discriminated against poor people, but what if grocery stores did it?
I don't want to have some algorithm giving me a pass fail score that determines where I can go and what I can do and it sure feels like that's the direction we're heading.
Are you sure about that? Image recognition isn't a horizontally scalable task if you're talking about guys with clipboards. And the larger that clipboard, the lower the accuracy gets. Think of it as you have to match each incoming patron against a database. If each security guard has the entire database, they're doing a costly time-intensive, & inaccurate search through the book (security guards are not only paid too little to care about this, but humans in general are going to perform poorly at a task of "does a picture of this person exist in these other 200 images of banned people taken in alternate lighting conditions, clothing, facial hair, etc". And remember, as a business your goal is to let in all the people who came in a timely fashion. Otherwise your business dies / people complain / laws get changed. So to do this, you'd basically have to have a close to 1:1 relationship between person entering and security guard screening. That doesn't scale, even for larger businesses.
Now you could invert the problem. You have the security guard take an image and distribute it to other guards who have their portion of their database that they're combing through and match against a subset of that. Still, that's a heck of a lot of extra man power that scales with the amount of bans you hand out and there's a natural backpressure for your business.
With automation though, you can scale this for pennies. So you don't have to be very discriminant about who you're banning which is a meaningful distinction. This isn't a bad PR approach. You probably can't muster enough political will to amend the laws to force venue owners to only ban people from public venues who themselves are being a public nuisance of some kind (which I think solves the problems a heck of a lot better than protected classes). But you can make it financially infeasible for them to do this by banning the new tech that lets them go after you.
What I meant was that each security guard has a certain subset of the database, so they're only responsible for scanning for those people. Say, instead of having 10 security guards each with a list of all 100 banned people, each security guard has a list of 10 people.
> Now you could invert the problem. You have the security guard take an image and distribute it to other guards who have their portion of their database that they're combing through and match against a subset of that. Still, that's a heck of a lot of extra man power that scales with the amount of bans you hand out and there's a natural backpressure for your business.
I think that's then an open problem of 1) how many people can one security guard reliably track, 2) how many people are on the ban list, 3) is it cheaper to hire that necessary number of security guards for each event than it is to invest in facial recognition tech? 4) How much cheaper or more expensive is it, exactly?
But my main question wasn't about the technical implementation, it was once again about what the actual argument is. Is it that businesses should be allowed to bar people as long as they don't use technology to do so? How would that account for different businesses having wildly different enforcement capabilities?
The issue is that the larger/cheaper the enforcement capabilities, the more likely frivolous bans are to be handed out.
Being able to implement small scale bans is reasonable including a "refuse the right to bar from service for any reason" type clause (which is obviously overridden by any protected groups legislation), but once implementing a permanent ban for large groups is a few clicks in a dashboard there's an issue.
For example anyone can sue anyone else, but mass filing of lawsuits by computer presents a novel problem.
This kind of issue happens all the time.
The situation would be quite a bit different in the US if automated tickets were sent out (or money were just deducted from a bank account) every time someone went 5 miles per hour over the speed limit.
Someone should let small town cops know about this contract. I've been ticketed for speeding 7, 5, and even 3 miles over the limit. I've also once had my car searched for running a stop sign (at 2 in the morning, when other than the cop car lurking in the parking lot, there were absolutely no cars anywhere). I was a teenager back then, and didn't know my rights, or had any resources to pursue legal recourse. But the point is that traffic laws are enforced extremely erratically, depending on where you happen to be living in a country.
Well, at least Mr. Mastro is self aware enough to realize the kind of people he’s a lawyer for.
> Alan Greenberg is a fan of Jerry Seinfeld. He is also, through his firm Greenberg Law P.C., representing a fan who sued Madison Square Garden after being assaulted at a Rangers game. That meant it could be tricky for him to attend a Seinfeld show at the Beacon Theater, which is owned by MSG Entertainment. He sued, so had a preliminary injunction in hand when he attended the show — but he also grew a beard to try to evade facial recognition.
Consider: a very outspoken left-wing musician says "I don't want any conservatives at my concert". The venue is hesitant, but this is big money. Well, we've got an agreement with this facial recognition company and this other people metadata company- yeah, we can probably make sure there's no one at your concert that we know has ever been to a pro-life rally or has liked more than 5 tweets by Donald Trump. They refuse the ticket sales, and they refuse the entry at the show. They claim they're concerned these people will be disruptive.
There's nothing illegal about doing that. There's nothing impossible about doing it either.
Then it's "Anyone who has ever joined a class action lawsuit against a fortune 500 company"- we're afraid if anything happens, you'll sue us!
Or how about "Anyone whose metadata indicates they'd vote in favour of politicians who vote against tax breaks for new stadiums"? Best keep your political views quiet, lest your 'corporate approval credit score' falls too low.
There's lots of great reasons why companies wouldn't want to do these things. But it's all technically feasible today, getting more accurate and more feasible over time.
Yeah, it is different, because a background check doesn't show anything related to your political beliefs. I might be forgetting some small details, but it is basically just criminal history + employment history + address history + some basic finance stuff like credit scores.
Also, running a background check on someone who wants to date your daughter is kinda weird. I hope that a potential suitor encountering such a background check would laugh and walk away the second they get asked.
If my daughter is dating a boy I’m going to ask around about the guy in whatever ways I want. I’m not limiting myself to the attributes you listed. That was my point.
Likewise if it’s my company, I can reject whatever job candidate I want for whatever reason I want, as long as I am following relevant non-discrimination laws etc. If I want to reject you because you wrote nasty things about me, which turned up in a google search (background check), I probably can
Oh yeah, good catch, I indeed was thinking of a different kind of a background check. I was thinking of an actual employer/police/financing/etc. type of a background check, which is pretty standardized in its scope.
Thanks for elaborating on it btw, I think I get your point now.
Depends where you are. Insofar as a concert is deemed a “public accommodation” that would probably be illegal under the DC Human Rights Act, which covers political affiliation along with a bunch of other things.
The federal government is narrowly circumscribed in how it can address these things but the state governments have general police powers and are not so limited.
If the city would get serious and simply say, "stop banning these people or stop selling alcohol", that would be the end of it.
Therefore picking who can enter is interstate commerce, no?
In a nutshell, WvF was about a guy growing enough feed to sell and an additional surplus for his own use, in violation of Depression production controls introduced to restore the wheat industry from the complete collapse it suffered during the Depression. Filburn could have grown wheat for his own use, or for sale, since the threshold was set high enough for either purpose (but was deliberately set too low to allow for both for all but subsistence farmers). But Filburn wanted to have his cake and eat it too, and got caught doing both, which he could only do because he had violated the production controls. Very importantly, Filburn sold his wheat across state lines...
If Filburn's actions had been replicated at a national level, wheat prices would have plummeted, the U.S. wheat industry would have collapsed, again, and Filburn would likely have been murdered by his fellow farmers for destroying their industry.
And that's my point. I'm of the personal opinion that the discriminatory issues addressed in the civil rights act should have been clearly codified/amended in the constitution to unquestionably seal the federal power to address them. Rayiner (who I replied to) cast doubt on federal power to stop certain kinds of discrimination that would even have strong aggregate interstate effect (like political affiliation), and my point is if Rayiner is correct then perhaps much of the civil rights act was in the purview of the state police powers unless the federal powers are expanded.
And I'd like to point out my critique here is examining the kinetics in how these things are enforced and play out. At least one person here (not referring to parent gamblor) has accused me of being indicative of being a "racist" or somehow someone down with racism, and I hope we can move forward thinking about the kinetics of dealing with discrimination of various kinds without presuming the counterparty must be a racist who doesn't like civil rights. Lets keep in mind the interstate trade kinetics used to enforce the civil rights act have also been used to enforce racism.
In an interconnected, modern society, wholly intrastate commerce is a very, very, rare thing. It's almost impossible for retail to be wholly intrastate except for de minimis sales by itinerant merchants, as most supplies used in manufacture will have crossed state boundaries (but the courts do recognize when such commerce occurs and is excluded from the purview of federal regulation).
Service is more easily constrained to the intrastate level, since local regulation of services has always been a local power. But yes, in the aggregate discrimination can have interstate effects. Indeed, there is a fair amount of federal civil rights legislation or case law that is predicated on, and requires, aggregate discrimination in order to apply at the local level because isolated incidents don't give rise to federal jurisdiction.
I'm of the personal opinion that the discriminatory issues addressed in the civil rights act should have been clearly codified/amended in the constitution to unquestionably seal the federal power to address them.
Literally, the last phrase of the 14th Amendment.
But note that job title isn't a protected class under federal law, which is rayiner's point. And they aren't generally needed, since there are a number of state/local laws which make MSG's actions illegal. MSG doesn't simply risk fines, they risk the loss of their liquor license, their tax exemption, bookings from artists that don't want to be associated with the wanton use of facial recognition, and numerous tort lawsuits for excluding people with valid tickets.
My position is clearly this isn't something just deferred to the state police powers. The fed can conjure up, via the interstate commerce clause, the requirement that businesses not discriminate even for local intrastate trade.
If congress can invent the authority out of thin air to govern intrastate commerce with regard to enforcing all of the now protected classes, I'm curious why you think they absolutely cannot also deal with discrimination on the basis of political affiliation or whether one is affiliated with an entity litigating something you disagree with.
A slippery slope would be “if we let that rock fall, soon it will be all rocks, and bigger rocks, and they’ll fall faster and faster until all life has ended, so legislate against falling rocks today”.
For example, before gay marriage was legalised I heard people claim legalising gay marriage was a slippery slope to allowing paedophilia and bestiality. This has not proved to be the case in reality.
Opponents of slippery slopes like to make the assumption the slope is steeper than what the original author may have had in mind. And so because we don’t find ourselves slipping down the slope fast enough, they declare the original argument bunk.
For example, in your argument about gay marriage, we haven’t accepted pedophilia and bestiality yet. But how long has gay marriage been legalized? What if the slope to pedophilia is 50 years long? We don’t know if in the future the stigma of being a “minor attracted person” will have worn off and people will be permitted to marry whoever or whatever they want without restrictions. Indeed, if someone will be happy marrying a dog because they have no faith in dating culture in the year 2060, why stop them? There is precedent for expanding the definition of marriage. What is the harm, especially as marriage grows increasingly meaningless and only provides an economic benefit?
So yea I hate slippery slopes. They are easily misrepresented.
It is, of course, not actually used in this manner typically; but, it is probably important to remember that not all things push to absurdity I guess.
This literally happened until the government eventually stepped in to regulate it.
Historically, they might have, but we decided barbers shouldn't be healthcare providers and now we have a shortage of healthcare providers.
The slippery slope is a real thing. Entropy is real. It takes work to maintain moral behavior.
Edit: some weirdo is going through my post history claiming this is phobic of something. What a weirdo.
https://newyork.public.law/laws/n.y._real_property_tax_law_s...
This article sheds no light on that, however:
https://gothamist.com/news/madison-square-garden-property-ta...
How much trickle-down effect there is...is irrelevant. I generate revenue from all the things I spend my salary on. I still have to pay taxes.
This is corporate welfare, pure and simple.
Or is it merely the effectiveness, brought about by facial recognition algorithms, that they object to? In other words, go ahead and have humans do it very ineffectively, that's somehow not against my rights, it's only when it actually works that it becomes a Violation Of My Human Rights. Not a great argument either.
She said it wouldn't have been so bad if they had just denied her a ticket. It would have saved her all the time, expense, and embarrassment. However, that is the problem inherent in using facial recognition in this way.
Would it have all been a-okay if an employee "manually" spotted her face on a CCTV feed and matched to a physical binder with lawyers' photos? No? Then this has nothing whatsoever to do with facial recognition itself.
But how do you arrive at this limit? Why 10? Why not 100? Why not 0?
(Put another way: it’s perfectly ordinary for the courts to rule on methods themselves.)
It is either okay to pick undesirable customers out of a crowd after (or perhaps in the process) of granting them entry, and kicking them out. Or it's not okay. Whether I use a room full of employees, a bigger room full of underpaid "interns", or a computer algorithm in a small box to do the matching is a detail of implementation.
If you're arguing 3, surely the argument has nothing to do with the technology used to identify you and kick you out to stifle your methodology of obtaining evidence outside the court-approved methods of discovery, it is the act of kicking you out that is in itself an issue.
If you're arguing 1, I'd say your private life is not being intruded upon in any fashion that's new. You chose to go to a public place, so it is unreasonable to expect that no one might try to identify you based on your facial characteristics.
Not sure what to make of 2 without further elaboration. I can sort of steel-man a coherent argument to this effect when it comes to government surveillance, but I don't think it'll apply to a private entertainment venue.
While I can't claim to know for certain about the goings on in casino security rooms, I've seen films from pre-facial-recognition era featuring attentive personnel browsing through dozens of CCTV cams, with binders full of photos of undesirables within arms reach.
A casino has totally different security needs than MSG, and is subject to significantly different types of laws. And if your point was true, then it's something that MSG would have done. They didn't. Full stop.
>If you go back and re-read the article a bit more attentively, I think you'll find examples from the early 20th century onward of this having been a problem
Your rudeness aside, I did read the article. Those examples aren't comparable because they did not happen on the scale we are discussing here (paralegals from the firm that aren't even on the case? that wouldn't be identifiable were it not for a firm's website, and linkedIn?). Sorry but you are demonstrating a lack of credible judgment and reasoning by the means of your arguments, which are specious and lacking in reasonable judgment. Your counterexamples are purposefully obtuse as to remove the meaningful distinctions between the things we are comparing. I have no reason to believe this has occurred for any reason aside from your own purpose.
This is unambiguously false. Examples in article from early 1900s, casinos, etc. Just going in circles here.
I don't think facial recognition needs to be banned. The two things that need to be banned are denying people access to events after you already took their money for admission to them, and denying people access to events for what their co-workers did.
Under the narrow "right to refuse service to anyone for every reason (except based on a protected class)" reading, there's nothing to stop, say, Live Nation, to refuse entry to any concert for life if they decided they didn't like you, for instance if they found out you bought or resold a ticket through other than their own scalping service. Or if you sent a mean tweet about Ticketmaster fees. LiveNation controls a giant proportion of venues so they would have the power to do that and if you don't like it, they don't need your money.
It's not even about feeling bad for those who end up banned. It's about knowing that when this power, and the available data for them, becomes 10x easier and better in a few years and people realize it, it will have "a chilling effect" as they say, on how comfortable people are about participating in any speech or activity that corporations may not like. Like "Well, I support Starbucks employees to unionize, but I'm not going to admit it openly because I don't want to be banned from Starbucks for life."
Starbucks is a silly example, but there are so many real near-monopolies or duopolies that I'm very nervous about giving them carte blanche to use what will no doubt be dramatically improving tech to be able to literally query a DB, select all, "Ban" - or what about "Warn" - next time you enter a venue you're pulled aside and handed a brochure stating that "while you've been admitted this time, your access privileges to our venues will be revoked the next time you engage in any further behavior that damages our reputation or interferes with our ability to conduct business."
What if you discover fraud or criminality after the ticket is sold but before entry? Leave this lawyer tempest in a teapot aside for the moment, I'm talking unambiguous crime.
>denying people access to events for what their co-workers did
Say I'm known to be employed by the Lawyers for The Right to Throw Octopi at Hockey Players Coalition, but haven't yet thrown my first octopus. Why can you not act proactively to prevent nuisance? Employment at a particular organization is not protected status, like race or sexual orientation would be. Also, what constitutes an event? If there's a trade show or a product unveiling I don't want certain competitors to attend, why should I have to grant them access? Other than you being in rather narrowly specified groups, if I don't want your money, I should be allowed to refuse it.
Do you mean crime related to the ticket purchase or event, e.g., stealing a credit card that you then use to buy the tickets with, or do you mean if you just happened to have committed an unrelated crime in the past?
I mean, they purchased tickets, so let 'em in and let 'em have at it, no?
Edit: Okay, I'll give a less ridiculous example, one that involves nuisance but not criminality.
I come from Ukraine; Alex Ovechkin is a Putin fanboy who refuses to condemn the invasion and genocide of my erstwhile compatriots. If I form a group of people who attend hockey games to heckle and accuse Ovechkin of being a genocide supporter, can MSG kick out a new member of my organization after learning of their joining? They won't sell me a ticket, they know I cause trouble. But he just joined, bought a ticket, then their security team got the updated the Facebook group member list.
Even if something happened prior to the purchase and I learn about it after the purchase? That seems oddly arbitrary.
Having thought of how this scenario works backwards, I discovered that I assumed the kicked out lawyers were issued a refund, but I have no evidence of it. If not, they ought to demand it.
The point of my example is that even if the victims were issued a refund, what MSG did is still wrong. Buyers don't get to unilaterally unwind ticket sales. Why should MSG get to do so?
In my opinion of how it should reasonably work - MSG should be in their right to kick them out, but only after that person who joined your group gets caught disrupting the game by heckling and accusing Ovechkin. Just like any other person who gets caught doing the same.
Only associating with you should never be a problem on its own (unless we are talking of group memberships that are criminal on their own, e.g., organized crime gangs).
Bringing it back to unpopular-person doing objectionable-thing that's not criminal, against popular-people, say something which will generate a lot of Twitter hullabaloo... Why should I not be able to prevent it? A far-right group heckles a drag queen reading event for children at a library, calling them "groomers" and generating shit maelstroms online and offline (I'd even say for good reason). I know this will happen, but still I must allow them entry to do the deed and (further?) traumatize 8 year olds before booting them out? Fuck that, I see a Facebook photo of a douchebag in that yellow rooster t-shirt or however these far-right losers choose to visually identify themselves these days, then I find out he's bought a ticket, then I deny him entry.
I propose to draw the line at organized crime affiliation when it comes to pre-emptively denying someone who hasn't done anything wrong at a big public event like that yet, yes. Worst case, you let them in, they get kicked out after they start heckling, they are banned from attending future events of that nature by the venue. Simple as that. Someone getting a chance to heckle at a massive stadium event for a minute before they get banned is not some massive risk with grave consequences.
> A far-right group heckles a drag queen reading event for children at a library, calling them "groomers" and generating shit maelstroms online and offline (I'd even say for good reason). I know this will happen, but still I must allow them entry to do the deed and (further?) traumatize 8 year olds before booting them out?
To address your specific scenario, no, you don't need to let them in. You are hosting your own small event at a library that doesn't require purchasing tickets, you can boot whoever you want however you want. Esp since the event is for children, I would have no qualms about any adult (who isn't a parent of one of the children attending the event or one of the organizers) just being blanket-denied entry. I.e., using an allow-list instead of a deny-list.
And if it's a Drag Reading Hour Gala at the MSG, tickets required for entry and sold online? Or, I don't know, it's an LGBT-themed music festival, with tickets sold openly online. Must I allow homophobes to disrupt a set before kicking them out, or can I kick them out purely on the basis of being members of the LGBT Concert Disrupters group on Facebook?
Feel like this is a pretty wild extrapolation that summarizes the core of this. I'm not a fan of the police state that we live in, but at the same time I do not feel a whole lot of empathy towards lawyers that are actively suing the venue? This article even outlines how this practice has been done in NYC for like a hundred years.
On the other hand, if this effort somehow succeeds and we have less facial recognition tech in the wild, props to them.
William Roper : God's law!
Sir Thomas More : Then God can arrest him.
William Roper : While you talk, he's gone!
Sir Thomas More : Go he should, if he were the Devil, until he broke the law.
William Roper : Now you give the Devil benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More : Yes, what would you do?
William Roper : Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil? Yes. I'd cut down every law in England to do that.
Sir Thomas More : And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you...where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast...Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down...and you're just the man to do it...do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then? Yes. I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
-- Robert Bolt, "A Man for All Seasons"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_for_All_Seasons_(1966_fi...
- and if you like that then (the ‘bad guys’ perspective):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Hall_(TV_series) is also well worth a watch.
And when you have a legitimate grievance against a company who also owns half the country? Who are you gonna call? Ghost busters? you better, because all the lawyers have been chilled and scarred away from helping you. And they won't even answer your call.
Even Wikipedia blocks people who have made legal threats. You don't even have to actually sue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_legal_threats
Don't be daft. Getting sued when you are a big business is not a grievance. It is a conflict resolution mechanism for grievances. It is already hard enough for regular people to win against big companies. Do you think if we let the companies bully the lawyers representing these people that is going to help with that?
Here is an example: A brick falling from a badly maintained facade smashes into your car. Luckily nobody is seriously hurt, but the car can't be driven until it is fixed. You think the facade's owner (the person who decided to not maintain it) should pay for it. When you ask them they stonewall you, and you are getting nowhere.
You call a lawyer but they just hang up the phone when you explain why you are calling. You call an other lawyer and the same happens. The seventh lawyer takes pity on you and explains to you that the owner of the badly maintained facade also owns a significant portion of all entertainment venues, and petrol stations and grocery stores in the state. If he even just suspects that a lawyer helped you, his hired goons will make the lawyer's life pretty unpleasant. And then the seventh lawyer also hangs up on you.
Do you want to live in this world? Do you think society will be richer/happier by living in this world?
You've misread the Wikipedia policy that you linked to; it says: "Do not post legal threats on Wikipedia. ... Users who post legal threats on Wikipedia are typically blocked from editing while the threats are outstanding." (Emphasis added.) The rest of the page goes on to emphasize that this doesn't preclude people from engaging Wikipedia about legal issues.
I don't think you need to extrapolate in order to make this an issue. Many of the lawyers mentioned in the article weren't a part of a case against MSG but rather just working for a firm that also had a case against MSG. I also don't have a lot of empathy toward rich lawyers, but I do have sympathy for their clients and large companies harassing lawyers just for working a firm that is suing them has a pretty clear chilling effect. Regardless of if this is currently legal or not, I think something should be done about it.
Trying to you carve out an exception so narrow it only applies to X results in a stupidly complex legal system less narrow exceptions have unintended consequences. This is such an edge case situation doing something could be more harmful than beneficial.
In my country, the jargon for this is 'right of admission reserved'
So... first, it's important to remember that "lawyers" are advocates. Someone else is suing MSG. Their lawyers merely represent them. This is the same logic that would treat a criminal defense attorney as a criminal or shun a prosecutor because ACAB. Lawyers aren't blameless about the cases they take, and can be good or bad people, but under the constitution we're all granted the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and lawyers are the profession that mediates that interaction.
Also: this lawyer isn't doing that. She's just an employee of a firm; she isn't working this case. Per the bit you quoted, this is absolutely isomorphic to banning someone because of who they work for. Imagine refusing to seat Walmart employees at a restaurant because they aren't unionized.
Yes, that's probably an extrapolation too far but it's not that much of an extrapolation.
So, if someday you have a legal dispute with an entertainment venue, like you worked for them for 6 months and they owe you $60K in back pay for which you then decide to sue them, we should not feel "empathy" for you then, right?
Not liking the people, their profession or who they're suing is a terrible standard for a society to operate under because I guarantee you there is something you do or believe in that someone else objects to (rightly or wrongly) and if you find yourself barred from some broad activity because of that, you would probably feel differently.
How far do you want to take that? Imagine she has a family and this job supports said family. Aren't they benefitting from her activities? Should MSG bar them too?
Also, her firm is suing MSG. She's not involved in the case.
The lawyer initially turned away wasn't involved in that suit at all, just worked for the same company. Imagine your company did something shitty (not that the litigation is shitty), then you personally started getting banned from places because of it, even if you had no involvement whatsoever.
Slippery slope fallacy for sure, but it's not unheard of. China applies it at a wide scale, to the point where I'm sure Faceapp is used to gather facial recognition data, and they use it to track ethnic minorities (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill...)
For all crimes? If not, then what's your criteria for which ones should and which ones shouldn't? If so, then would we have to stop keeping sex offenders away from children?
Even if they just happen to work on that case and have nothing to do with the specific action against MSG?