Here's an example of how the wording of a law can have an unforeseen interpretation. Washington state has a law (the Personality Rights Act) that prohibits the unauthorized use of a person's name or likeness in commercial advertising. This sort of makes sense. We would not think it was right to show a picture of someone in an advertisement or needlessly use a person's name trying to sell something to make a profit, without that person agreeing to it. This helps protect a person's privacy in the public eye. (of course obviously this would not apply to political advertisements, however) But now here is the interesting thing. The "White Pages" is facing a lawsuit. For those who may not know, the "White Pages" is a private for-profit service that compiles a list of people's names, home addresses, and home phone numbers. This concept of having publicly available telephone address directories has been around since the early 1900s. The internet version of the White Pages has a site that allows a person to look up a person's name and see some partial information about that person. The idea, of course, is to get the person who is looking up that name to be willing to sign up and pay for the service so they can see the full information about that person (and other persons) who they are searching for. But the lawsuit against the White Pages claims this constitutes illegal "commercial advertising" under the law, since the reason why the White Pages is providing those names is to get the people to pay for more information. Technically, the claim in the lawsuit is correct. But the reasoning is absurd. It would not be illegal for the White Pages to provide that information for free, or for the White Pages to provide the names and information to paying customers. But if the White Pages provides some of that information for free, using those names to try to get people to pay for more information connected to those names, then it constitutes "using names for advertising". Will the court hold to a literal interpretation of the law? Or will the court disregard the plain meaning of the law in favor of common sense and a rational interpretation of the likely original purpose of the law? For further reading you can look up this news article: Seattle-based whitepages.com faces legal action over unauthorized use of personal information, by Shawn Garrett, KIRO Seattle, September 6, 2024 The class-action suit was filed in the Western District of Washington. The likely motivations for this lawsuit? Maybe some are concerned about privacy. They can't stop the White Pages from providing this information, but they can stop the White Pages from making some of the information freely available to non-paying people who do not sign up. And of course money. Lawyers just looking for any legal basis to initiate a lawsuit against a big company and collect money. They are probably expecting to be paid a big settlement from the company, which is like a legal ransom. Because if this case went to court, it could end up being either too expensive or very risky for the White Pages company. In my opinion this is an extremely frivolous lawsuit, despite it having some firm legal footing in the law. It's a very questionable legal interpretation of this law.
