One of the interesting stories going around is Wizards of the Coast and Nintendo being sued for conducting an illegal lottery in California. The contention is that since Pokemon CCG packs have random card distributions, and some of those cards are worth a lot to collectors, that selling Pokemon packs is really a lottery.

This is kind of interesting, since gambling of all sorts is illegal in California. Exceptions being the state lottery, gambling on federal lands, and non-profit raffles. This is why there is always a way to get a free game card for any games that fast food places run.

But is selling Pokemon CCG packs, or any CCG packs a lottery? WotC doesn't set the price of the individual cards, although they affect the collectors market by how rare the cards are (and to a lesser extent, how useful they are in a game). But the cards are expressly sold for a game.

Most people buy CCG games to play them with other people. Some people also like to try to collect all of the cards which is harder for the rare cards which cost a lot. This can't be illegal since stamp collecting is not illegal. Collecting Star Wars toys is not illegal. Even if that collecting is for the purpose of hopefully reselling the items later at a profit.

Now, it is illegal for a comic store to package a "random" set of comics and sell them as a black box. People buy those in hopes of getting a valuable comic book, so it is a lottery. There is an exception or a special law that exempts this kind of selling by a comic book publisher. So it's ok to sell random comics in their original packaging but you can't repackage them yourself and sell that.

So is selling CCGs similar, would it be covered by the same law? Is that law meant to protect a manufacturer from selling a set of things where one of them may be valuable? Part of the reason to randomly distribute cards and have rare cards is so that kids will buy more packs in search of the good cards.

For the most part this is not a serious law suit since it's being brought to civil court and not criminal court. The defendants want money for pain and suffering. Nobody else has brought up criminal proceedings against WotC. So it seems to me that people are trying to use the law to make money.

Funny thing is that the law firm that is leading this case just found out that one of the secondary defendants is one of their clients. It's a large law firm and one of the branches is legal counsel for one of the defendents, so obviously there is a conflict of interest. Subsequently the law firm has withdrawn from the case, although there are other lawyers participating for the plaintiffs.

As can be surmised, I don't think WotC is breaking the law. Laws are made to protect us and they shouldn't be used in the way that some litigants use it. It's disappointing that there are people who try to abuse our laws, this is why we have so many of them.