Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we cover the breaking news of this week's Supreme Court decision to allow sports gambling nationwide, followed by coverage of how a fictional card game from Star Wars is being enforced by Disney in a copyright lawsuit.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp135
In 1992, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act or PASPA, a law that barred state-authorized sports gambling outside the state of Nevada. That left Nevada and specifically Las Vegas as the only places where a person could legally bet on the outcome of any single sports game, and the profits obviously rolled in there.
This law was challenged as unconstitutional by the state of New Jersey, which obviously has a bustling casino scene in Atlantic City and other places. While New Jersey lost at every federal court case leading up to the Supreme Court appeal, the highest court in the land ruled 6-3 this week in the case Murphy v NCAA that the PASPA was unconstitutional.
Ironically, the Court's decision was written on the basis of federalism by conservative Justice Alito, while opening up similar arguments for other progressive causes like marijuana legalization and sanctuary cities to be regulated by the states instead of the federal government. More specifically, PASPA was deemed to violate the anti-commandeering doctrine from the 10th Amendment, which bars the federal government from compelling state officials to implement federal policy. So forcing states to maintain their bans on sports gambling to serve federal law interests was not constitutional. So what does this decision mean?
Basically, it's now left to the states to decide whether to enact laws to allow such gambling, just like with state-run lotteries and the like. New Jersey hopes to be up and running in a couple weeks, while other states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Delaware have legislation pending already in hopes to be open for gambling business by football season. This decision will also hopefully curtail the illegal betting markets and pressures that have been present since PASPA's introduction in the early 90s. So sports and betting fans, stay tuned for some local betting near you soon.
Turning to our second story, a mobile game app developer named Ren Ventures and Sabacc Creative Industries created a virtual card game called sabbac. Lucasfilm and Disney took umbrage to this because the game sabacc first appeared in the novelization of the 1980 movie The Empire Strikes Back, and the app developer allegedly uses several copyrighted images and characters from the Star Wars universe to promote their game on Facebook and Twitter. Thus, after a Cease and Desist letter in April 2017, a lawsuit was filed last December.
Last week, Lucasfilm moved for a summary judgement win by claiming that Ren Ventures is clearly willfully infringing on the copyrights and trademarks of Star Wars. Ren Ventures has counterclaimed based on its registered trademark for the game name sabacc, saying that Lucasfilm is infringing its trademark.
So who wins in this battle of the sci fi stars? While it's true that Ren Ventures has a trademark for the name sabacc for computer games and apps as of 2016. Lucasfilm likely has the superior claim thanks to the much older copyrighted materials. The mere concept of a game described in a piece of literature would not be automatically protected by copyright or trademark, but Ren Ventures probably crossed the line more clearly with marketing materials used on social media.
The Bottom Line is, anytime something is a big money maker like sports gambling or the Star Wars franchise, it's not surprising when others come in to try and get a piece of the pie. In the case of gambling in New Jersey, the motives are solely profit-driven, while in the case of Ren Ventures, the app may be just as much a fan homage to Star Wars as a play for profit. If nothing else, we learn once again not to mess with Jersey casinos or Disney, the king of enforcing IP rights.
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