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WA Law Means Linking to Gambling Websites Illegal
tpoker writes "Following a previous story on Washington State making online gambling a felony, the Seattle Times reports that the first legal salvos have begun. 'The first casualty in the state's war on Internet gambling is a local Web site where nobody was actually doing any gambling. What a Bellingham man did on his site was write about online gambling. He reviewed Internet casinos. He had links to them, and ran ads by them. All that, says the state -- the ads, the linking, even the discussing -- violates a new state law barring online wagering or using the Internet to transmit 'gambling information ... Telling people how to gamble online, where to do it, giving a link to it -- that's all obviously enabling something that is illegal.'"
The same Seattle Times printed my letter to the editor on the same subject today.
...any discussion whatsoever of rape, incest, murder, drug use, etc. must also be illegal.
Reminds me of when AOL added the word "breast" to their filters without thinking through the consequences. All the members of a breast cancer group suddenly had to start referring to themselves as survivors of "hooter cancer".
That's using the internet to transmit gambling information.
Why not make it illegal to link to a page that links to a page that links to gambling?
I can actually see how the legislators could see a reason to do that. Taxpayer X wants to link to a gambling site, but knows that that's illegal. So he links to a site that has links to gambling sites, and tells you to click through. (Even worse, maybe that link redirects to the gambling site!) So clearly this needs to be stopped as well.
And what about linking to a page that links to a page that links to a page that links to gambling?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Something tells me that the Washington State Lottery will still get to promote itself online... apparently they also were even going to sell lottery tickets online but I can't find evidence of them still doing it.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.