He sold gambling software while living in a state where gambling was illegal.
I'm all ears for arguments that gambling shouldn't be illegal or that prosecutors abuse their authority or many other arguments.
Jack Daniels Whiskey is made and sold by a distillery in a county where selling liquor is illegal.
It might seem like a pedantic question, but laws can be very narrow in scope or vague in meaning. "Gambling" and "Selling gambling software" are legally two different things.
Maybe his actions were, indeed, perfectly legal, and this is entirely a prosecutor abusing his power. But we have to be able to see a distinction between him selling something like a hammer, which isn't illegal to use in his jurisdiction, and gambling software, which probably is illegal to use in his jurisdiction.
Covering your eyes and not figuring out if your actions are legal or not is a pretty crappy defense.
> extremely stupid to be making something that is
> illegal to use in your jurisdiction
If he was making slot machines and selling them to legal casinos (e.g. in Las Vegas), do you think that he would have been busted like this? Highly doubtful.
This happened because his customers were crossing the line with the product, but -- to carry the analogy -- I doubt a slot machine maker would be held accountable if Caesar's Palace decided to open up an illegal gambling operation with the slot machines. The issue here is that the main offenders (foreign casinos) are outside of the state's jurisdiction, so they are going after the only person that they do have in their jurisdiction.
If he were growing marijuana and selling it to people where marijuana is legal, no one would have trouble understanding this concept: hire a lawyer very early on. He only got a lawyer after the cops descended on him, and then only crappy ones he found on the Internet.
I don't know the specifics of the law, and you don't either.
(I shouldn't have to say this, again, but I'm not saying there wasn't prosecutorial abuse here. Neither does this guy, because he hoped he could ignore the question.)
A better analogy:
- Drugs are legal to possess, but the act of buying them is illegal
(in the US).
- This guy makes an e-commerce software package designed specifically
for selling drugs.
- This guy only sells the software to companies in Amsterdam.
- He's arrested because one of the companies in Amsterdam is selling
illegally to US citizens.
- The government puts a gun to his head and tells him to hack into
his customers' websites in a scene straight out of Operation
Swordfish
I don't know the law, and neither do you, and neither did this guy. If he had spent a few thousand of that $2.3 million on a lawyer he would be better informed and had someone on retainer.
Maybe he would have found out some simple way to comply.
Maybe he would have found out there was no way to comply.
Maybe he would have found out that he was already completely complying and this is just your "Operation Swordfish" scenario.
But, since Operation Swordfish has been brought up, I'm out.
My general thought is that it's quite possible that his lawyer would not have foreseen this turn of events. His lawyer probably would have referenced local, state, and Federal law on this, but could have easily not seen that another state would try to prosecute him for his clients offering online gambling to residents of that state.
(I think it goes without saying that a lawyer probably would not have foreseen the government offering him a plea bargain to commit a Federal -- and international -- crime in order to plead guilty to a lesser charge)
It is illegal to do certain things with marijuana. Possession is one of those things. Growing, distributing, selling, processing, all fall under the category of possession.
It is not illegal to write about marijuana, sing songs about it, paint pictures of it, talk about it, or trade photographs of it.
"Gambling" is not illegal.
It is illegal to gamble in certain ways. One of those ways is when a gambling participant wins anything of tangible value greater than what they paid to play the game. This is why some children's arcades that give tickets for games of luck are legal, and some carnival games are legal. Your winnings are required by law be worth less than what you paid to play.
Playing poker is not illegal, playing bingo is not illegal, playing slots is not illegal, playing blackjack is not illegal, guessing who will win the presidential election is not illegal, and guessing how much rain will fall next Tuesday is not illegal. Just don't gamble for tangible value while you do these things!
"He sold a Bugatti Veyron in a state where driving over 75mph was illegal."
With gambling software, the only thing you can do is illegal gambling. With a Bugatti Veyron, well as long as its speed is not locked at 75mph+, you can drive it all your life without doing anything illegal.
You can also do legal gambling.
Absolutely. And that appears to be the context in which Laurent was using it. carbocation compared selling a sports car in a jurisdiction with a low speed limit to selling gambling software in a jurisdiction where gambling is illegal. Laurent replied that drivers of the sports car could still obey the law, while users of the gambling software would always be disobeying that jurisdiction's laws.
I'm not sure I find the argument all that compelling, but it seems to me that people are arguing with a premise that is tautologically true.
(1) Only if they are gambling with the gambling software. They could be using it for non-illegal gaming purposes (such as free online poker where no money is involved), for research, for education, etc. Gambling is illegal in this hypothetical jurisdiction, not software that allows one to gamble.
(2) Just as the Veyron can be produced in one jurisdiction and used elsewhere, gambling software can be produced in one jurisdiction and sold to people who then use it elsewhere. From the article, this is, indeed, what the software author claims to have done.
In other words, software that can be used for behavior that is illegal in one jurisdiction can quite possibly be used for legal purposes in that same jurisdiction (1) or for the same purpose in a jurisdiction where such behavior is legal (2).
Saying that you can't gamble in a place where gambling is illegal doesn't advance the discussion because nobody has yet disagreed with that explicitly or tacitly, as far as I can tell.
That's a good part of my point.
> With gambling software, the only thing you can do is illegal gambling.
That's untrue.