March 30, 2010 (CAP Newswire) – And the back-and-forth continues: Just over a week after having the online poker domain name case returned to it, the Kentucky Court of Appeals is reported to have granted a motion to put the case back in the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction.
However, the Supreme Court in the state has not yet indicated that it will take the case again. It’s likely that, if it does, some more concrete representation will have to appear from some of the owners for the 141 domain names in question. But those owners may be reluctant to take that step, since it may help legitimize Kentucky’s poker domain grab by giving it formal legal attention.
According to Poker News Daily, iMEGA Chairman Joe Brennan has signed an affidavit that pledges that the owners of TruePoker.com were indeed members of his trade organization. If accepted, that would seem to meet the Supreme Court’s request, and it appears to have been accepted as such by the Appeals Court.
For his part, Brennan remains confident that the case will ultimately be overturned. “The Court can now make a decision based on Kentucky law. Based on the language of the decision, we know the Court wants to do just that. We know that the law favors us, and frankly, so do the Commonwealth’s attorneys.”
The case stretches back to September 2008, when the state first tried to seize the 141 domain names under the excuse that they were “gambling devices” under Kentucky’s state law. Since then, the case has worked its way up the state’s court system, with a win for the online poker industry at the Appeals Level (that’s now in question). Given the implications of this case (seizing 141 pieces of international property), it’s not conceivable that the case could even go on to the U.S. Supreme Court — and, depending on that ruling, new tensions over online gambling trading rights among the EU, the U.S. and the WTO could even emerge.
With such huge names in Internet poker as PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker (the world’s first- and second-largest online poker rooms, respectively), this case could have an immediate and lasting effect on the entire online poker-playing world.