(Don’t you guys just love it when I take the time out to read the legal paper? ;))
In Pittsburg, a sixth grade student won a $1500 award against his school in small claims court Tuesday.
Seems Rudy, the student, had taken 161 Pokemon cards to school – in violation of school rules – and a school monitor confiscated them for the day. At the end of the day, when Rudy went to pick them up, they had disappeared. The school refused Rudy’s claim for $500, and so he took 'em to small claims court.
The judge sided with Rudy, awarding him $1500 based on the estimates as to the value of the cards provided by the student and the school. The judge said that once school officials took the cards, they were responsible for them.
Wasn’t there a recent lawsuit filed on behalf of two youngsters, claiming that the Pokemon publishers were essentially engaging in gambling by randomly putting rare and valuable cards in their card sets? IIRC, the suit alleged RICO-type violations.
Oly the valuation of teh cards makes this seem absurd. The principle seems sound. If you confiscate property, you should be liable for any damage/loss that occurs while said property is in your posession. If the school cannot secure the property it confiscates, then it should send the students home and tell them to come back without it. (Yes, I understand logistics migt require a child sitting in the office bored out of his skull until a parent can come fetch him.)
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Indeed there was talk of a lawsuit against Pokemon’s creators and their American distributors for creating a ‘lottery’. The reasoning was, by putting rare cards in some packages, the producers/distributors encourage buying more packs of cards in the hope of finding a rare card. Hence, lottery.
If you want a laugh, though: the law firm that decided to file this suit, Milberg
Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach LLP, named American company, 4Kids Entertainment, as a co-defendant. A few days later, the firm realized that they were the corporate counsel for 4Kids. They had sued themselves.
So, they withdrew themselves from the suit with much much egg on face. Don’t know the current state of the suit.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with requiring the school to compensate the kid for the school’s negligence in losing the cards. Consider this, though. Isn’t the kid in the wrong by having brought the cards to school against express school rules in the first place? Shouldn’t he bear some of the burden of the loss?
Had I been the judge (and I have sat as a small claims judge on occasion), I think I would have assigned the blame 50-50, and if the cards’ value was $1500, awarded the kid half that.
P.S. Max – LOVE that story. Somebody didn’t run a conflict-of-interest check before filing THAT lawsuit!
Melin:
The student violated school policy. He is therefore subject to school disciplinary action. I do not see how this makes him partially liable for school negmigence in caring for posessions under their control. If the teacher had take the cards and burned them in front of a school assembly would you agree that they should be liable for only half the loss? Now, if the school wants to pass a policy that states Pokemon cards brought onto school grounds will be destroyed (and defend that position against the inevitable challenge) then I would agree with you. In that case the loss of the cards would be a forseeable consequence of teh student’s action. In fact, I would then be arguing that the student was 100% liable and teh school should pay nothing. (Well, I would probably be arguing that the policy was draconian and a violation of property rights, but I would agree on the liability issue assuming the policy had passed court challenges.)
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Maybe they do not anymore, but there were certain things my high school would confiscate and not return. Most were things that were illegal for students to have (cigarrettes, dope, alcohol) but not all (certain fireworks are legal in Missouri year-round, for example). Perhaps this was just never challenged since there probabaly weren’t any parents sympathetic about a kid’s blackcats being taken away.
As far as pokemon being gambling, its odd the same thing has never been applied to baseball or any other collectible card. I remember when I was in my baseball card phase we’d spend hours at the shop - you’d buy a pack, go through it, any valuable cards that you didn’t particularly want you’d redeem for more packs of cards. Of course, you spent far more money than you ‘made’ and in the end it all ended up in the attic anyway.
I think I’ll just jump in here and point out that students in puplic schools (and private in most cases) have less rights than anyone in the country, at all.
Some schools do have policies directing that contraband is not returnable, or only returnable to a parent, or only returnable after a pre-set period (as a deterrent).
In the absence of such a policy, however, I suppose the student does have reason to expect that the confiscated materials will be returned to him, and the right to seek damages if they are not.
Emotionally, saying that the school & the student contributed equally to the sequence of events leading to the loss of the cards, and splitting financial liability sounds like justice to me, but logically I can’t support it.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
I think I’m going to sue my school for a Walkman, a Zippo, and two Penthouse magazines. They never did give that stuff back, dammit. (Of course I was reading the Penthouse Forum really loud in typing class, but I guess that’s another story)
My take on this would be that unless the school had clearly established a policy that cards brought to school were subject to irrevocable confiscation or that confiscated property was subject to the risk of loss, then the student had a valid argument. Legal principle generally holds that you must not only define the nature of the actions that constitute a crime, you must also define what the possible punishments will be. The student undoubtedly pointed out that the original punishment he could expect to face was the loss of possession of these cards during the school day (I assume this was the school’s usual policy). Instead, due to the school’s actions, he actually suffered the permanent loss of these cards (which had a value of $1500). He could therefore argue that the loss of $1500 was an unreasonably excessive punishment for his crime in view of the past policy of the school.
I am going to add a twist to this exceptional tale. Let us say that the school confiscated Rudy in place of the cards. When his parents, later that day, asked for him back, the teacher couldn’t find him.
So the parents press criminal charges against the school and the child. How much do you think Rudy’s parents would be awarded? (His cards were returned in mint condition.)
All the new collectible cards are different than the cards we got as kids in one important aspect: the packs are random. Remember we always used to get the same cards together, say, one Pete Rose, one Joe Neckbone, and two other cards (and that nasty-ass pink gum) in a pack? Every pack with Pete Rose was the same. Or, if we bought a case, we were pretty much guaranteed to get the whole set?
To make sure that the rare cards were spread out (and to make sure kids had to buy a trunkload of cards in hopes to get one super-card, the Wizards of the Coast folks went overseas to a printer that could ensure randomness.
My friend described it as the ‘random reward principle’ or something like that. And it is just shy of gambling, because you never know the true value of your purchase (two dollars worth of cards, or two hundred dollars worth) until you open it.
-sb
“This is going to take a special blend of psychology and extreme violence.”
Spankboy,
That is by far the best explaination of the “gambling” lawsuit I’ve seen. Very clear- it made me go “Ahhhhh. NOW I get it”. I didn’t realize that you can’t buy a box of these things and have a set.
Zette
“If I had to live your life, I’d be begging to have someone pop out both my eyes. Just in case I came across a mirror.” - android209 (in the Pit) Zettecity
Voted “Most Empathetic”- can you believe that?
On the gambling issue, I take exception to the idea that you do not know how much a box of cards is worth when you purchase it. You know exactly how much it is worth because it is exactly the price you just paid. The manufacturers, while they admitedly manipulate distributions to create rarity in the marketplace, have no direct control over the valuations decided upon by the secondary market. They simply put rare cards out there which may increase greatly in value. Certainly they hope for this result, as it will drive sales for their product, but neither they nor the consumer have any guarantees. If I but a sealed box of old hardcovers at a garage sale, is the seller holding a lottery because one of those books might be a rare first edition? Are first run publishers holding lotteries when they publish an unknown author’s first novel, since he might become famous and the edition might become valuable on the secondary market?
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Spankboy - When I was a kid were looking for Ken Griffey Jr. Rookies, not Pete Rose
And at that time, the card disbursement was random. If you wanted a whole set, you bought one - buying a case of cards was pretty well guaranteed not to get you a complete set.
Well, he performed an action that presumably he knew the administration wouldd not like. Does that make him “in the wrong”? I’m willing to accept that the school has certain rights to create school policy, but to say that it has the right to declare people “in the wrong” is quite different. “There will be conequences if you do X” is one thing; “You will lose your property rights if you do X” is quite another.
And doesn’t the fact that he’s a minor affect his ability to assume liability? I mean, on one hand we have as sixth grader that decides to ignore school rules, and on the other we have adults that fail to fulfill their responsibilty. Aren’t the adults more responsible?
On the gambling issue: I don’t think that there really is a clear gambling vs. not gambling distinction. It’s more of a spectrum, with some activities being clearly not gambilng, some clearly gambling, but a lot of activities being somewhere in the middle. The stock market, for instance, I believe to be closer to the not gambling side than to the gambling side, but it’s not quite all the way over to the not gambling side.
Spiritus Mundi posted:
Prior to opening it, that’s how much it’s worth. But once you open it, its price can change. This is similar to Lotto. When you first buy a Lotto ticket, you know how much it’s worth; it’s worth one dollar. But once the winning numbers are announced, its value changes.
While the latter statement pushes this activity away from the gambling side, the former shows that it isn’t quite all the way to the not gambling side either.
If the seller purposefully witholds information on which books are in the box with the intent of increasing the randomness of the value, that pushes the activity towards the gambling end of the spectrum.
Even then, you don’t know the worth of it. It’s not until you can find somebody to buy them from you that you know the true worth. I have two copy-paper boxes of Magic: The Gathering cards left from when I played. According to trading magazines, those cards are very valuable – probably over a thousand dollars. But if I can’t get anybody to pay me for them, they are worth nothing.
On the issue of creating rarity, yes, the rarity affects the price of the card on the secondary market. But the company doesn’t benefit directly from that. Once they sell it as part of a pack, they don’t get anything else from it. Others do. Some rare cards suck and are worth almost nothing. Others are great and are worth a lot. But in both cases, the value is in large part determined by how it plays in the game, not just because it’s a rare card. It’s the game that matters in the end, and that game is not gambling.
