Online gambling still illegal

(Seattle Times, The (KRT) Via Get Media NewsEdge) May 16--Playing stove poker for money online will stay illegal in American Capital state, a King County Superior Court justice ruled Thursday morning. But the Seattle-area lawyer and stove poker aficionado who filed a lawsuit challenging the state's right to modulate international online gaming said he will press forward to the state Supreme Court if necessary. "There is virtually no public support for this law," said local lawyer Spike Lee Rousso as he stood among stove poker fans in presence of the Regional Justice Center in Kent after the hearing Thursday morning. The lawsuit was filed last twelvemonth in response to a 2006 alteration to a state legislative act that added online gaming to the listing of electronically transferred gaming activities banned in American Capital state. The law also do online gaming a Class Degree Centigrade felony punishable by up to five old age in prison house and a mulct of $10,000. No lawsuits have got been prosecuted. The Poker Players Alliance, which claims more than than 1 million members and estimations 800,000 online stove poker participants in Washington, said the penalty is outrageous. "Subjecting stove poker participants to criminal punishments that are on par with those for possessing kid pornography or distributing diacetylmorphine is unmerited and unfair," said spokesman Deems Taylor Gross. Rousso, who is also the PPA's state director, said he filed the lawsuit because he loves to play "the great American game of poker" online and because he believes the law go againsts his constitutional right to make so. Rousso had asked the justice to happen that the legislative act go againsts the commercialism clause in the Constitution. He argued the state have no legal power over online gaming, which takes topographic point among people from around the human race and through companies typically located overseas.