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This public domain photo of Same Bleakley signing a book on surfing has been SCIENTIFICALLY DESIGNED to optimize the chance of Martin Wiskcol coming to read this blog.
An attentive reader alerted me to Michael Hiltzik’s story from Friday’s LA Times on how Ling Ling Chang took a lazy shortcut in drafting legislation and messed up the law so badly that it may wipe out independent booksellers. That’s a pretty impressive degree of influence for a first-term legislator! Regulating an entirely industry to death without even trying!
She has some advice for independent booksellers about how to survive her snafu: just violate the law! (No word as to whether she’ll cover their losses if they lose in court. Probably not, huh?) She refused to be interviewed by the Times about the matter, though someone did send them an email on the matter from her account. (That would certainly be less humiliating for her.)
The Times says that the bill deals with memorabilia scamming — people forging celebrity signatures on collectible items. The topic first hit the state codes solely in respect to sports memorabilia. An existing law addresses dealers in autographed sports collectables.
Anyone who “is in the business of offering collectibles,” which are defined as “an autographed sports item, including, but not limited to, a photograph, book, ticket, plaque, sports program, trading card, item of sports equipment or clothing, or other sports memorabilia sold or offered for sale in or from this state by a dealer to a consumer for five dollars ($5) or more,” that are presented as “bearing the actual signature of a personality signed by that individual’s own hand,” had better made sure that they’re offering the real deal or they’ll have 50 shades of hell to pay, including the ability to be sued for 10 times actual damages, plus fees and costs, by anyone deceived.
You don’t want to get on the wrong side of that law. Now Mark Hamill of the Star Wars franchise started complaining that the same law should apply to entertainment collectibles, because people were making a lot of money off of his reputation be selling a lot of Star Wards merchandise signed by Mark Hamill that was not actually signed by Mark Hamill, ripping off both him (as the person who controls how much of what he signs) and the consumers (who are perhaps trying to get a contact high of the bright side of the force (or whatever the dark side isn’t) and instead get fraudster cooties. Sounds reasonable! (Well, it is to the extent that the existing law is reasonable, which Hiltzik notes it probably isn’t, but that’s not Chang’s fault.)
So what did Chang do to extend the law from merely sports to entertainment as well? Did she add the word “entertainment” to the law? No, she did not! She just took out the word “sports,” and the list of examples of items covered, entirely. Foop! “Death to all modifiers!”
Now that would be fine and dandy if the only sorts of signed collectibles came from the magisteria of “sports” and “entertainment.” Alas, they do not. People sell signatures of politicians (technically not “entertainment”), royalty (“entertainment” but not acknowledged as such), scholars, and many more. And that seems reasonable, doesn’t it? We don’t want any fake Kennedy, Windsor, or Einstein signatures around!
The problem is that there are more kinds of autographed collectibles than sports or entertainment of celebrity collectibles, and some of them are entirely legitimate even though what is signed costs more than $5 (and would thus be subject to the onerous rules established under this law.) But Chang didn’t know that because — in her drive to grandstand before the current election — she either didn’t ask the businesses involved in this industry at all or at least didn’t do so very well. Because if she HAD asked, she’d have quickly realized that there’s one kind of autographed collectible that routinely sells for over $5 — and the ability to sell this collectible largely helps to keep a venerable but threatened industry in business. But Chang may be unfamiliar with this group.
They’re called “booksellers.”
And the ability to bring an author in for a reading and then let people buy autographed copies of their books is a major moneymaker for independent bookstores in particular, because while you may be able to get a Stephen King autograph from eBay or Amazon, you’re probably more likely to believe that it really came from him if you saw him actually signing the copy that you’re buying.
And you don’t really need a “certificate of authenticity” — itself easily forged, by the way, for lovers of delicious irony — which is what this new regulation requires booksellers to have and to hold onto. That regulation (among some others), combined with the threat of lawsuits (among some others), is what it panicking retail booksellers who are wondering if they should cancel their book signings come January 1 rather than risk the major lawsuits that this half-baked regulation makes possible. Here’s Hiltzik, waxing wroth.
Chang and her staff say general bookstores should just ignore the law, since it wasn’t designed to apply to them. That’s easy for them to say, but not especially comforting for booksellers, who would bear the legal risk if a judge decides that Chang is wrong.
As legislating, this was inexcusably sloppy. [Emphasis added. Then contemplated, then augmented.] None of the Senate or Assembly analysts who studied the bill appears to have devoted a second’s thought to whether the market for autographed collectibles might extend beyond sports or entertainment, and what differences there might be. For the most part, they just parroted Chang’s assertion that “94% of all autographed Beatles memorabilia is forged, as are 76% of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley collectibles” and that the FBI values forged memorabilia at $500 million to $900 million— figures that are unverifiable and probably inflated.
Chang may have lied about the basis for her new law? Inconceivable! (Sorry for the interruption; back to Hiltzik):
“It’s disappointing and surprising that no one reached out to the professional organizations in this field,” says Gabe Boyers, a dealer of music-related historical items in Newton, Mass., and president of the Professional Autograph Dealers Assn. “There was a lack of real engagement.”
Chang’s office is very defensive about this fiasco. Chang, who is running for a state Senate seat, wouldn’t get on the phone with me. Instead, she emailed a statement insisting that her measure “does not apply to bookstores any more than it would a convenience store.”
Whoa, whoa — let me stop her there. Booksellers sell items worth more than $5 — they’re called “books” — that have the author’s signature on them, which increases their value. Convenience stores, in my experience, don’t. So if the law applies to booksellers but not to convenient stores, that difference between their practices might explain why, right?
She blamed the uproar on “misinformation circulated on the internet” and pledged “to submit a statement on the legislative record clarifying how this bill applies to booksellers of all kinds.” The goal is to specify that the law doesn’t apply to author signings at general bookstores.
That may not be good enough. Chang’s statement will need to be approved by the speaker of the Assembly, so it may not materialize until after the law goes into effect. Meanwhile, the law stands as written, applying to anyone “principally in the business of selling or offering for sale collectibles” or holding themselves out as “having knowledge or skill peculiar to collectibles.” It defines “collectible,” however, only as “an autographed item sold or offered for sale” for $5 or more.
By the way that law applies not just to anyone within California, but anyone who does business within California. Like, you know, a foreign corporation to the state called “Amazon.” If I were the kind of lawyer that my dog wishes I was, I’d be ordering a collectible off of Amazon at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, when the law goes into effect, and have a lawsuit complaining about their violating the provisions of this law filed the next business day.
Before moving off of that topic, let me tell Assemblywoman Chang one reason the “oh, this doesn’t apply to booksellers” argument may not fly: it’s because your bill also added a new section to the law that did specifically exclude another industry from its regulatory requirements: pawnbrokers! So the idea of consulting with potentially affected commercial industries clearly did occur to you, making it easier for an attorney to argue that the exclusion of booksellers from this “safe harbor” must have been intentional. An oversight, you say? But clearly anyone with a Bachelor’s degree must realize that booksellers do sell signed books that cost over $5. (Oh, wait — sorry!)
As Hiltzik notes, Chang is clearly anxious about this dazzling act of legislative incompetence getting local notice. The concern is probably not so much that it makes it look like neither she nor anyone on her staff has ever set foot inside of a bookstore (which I’m pretty sure her opponent Josh Newman has.) It’s more that she has now turned in her application for the role of “Worst Business-Killing Over-Regulator of the Year,” which is a really bad label for a Republican to wear.
“Worst Business-Killing Over-Regulator of the Year”! Well, at least it will be something to tell her non-existent clients at her non-existent managing consulting business about when she leaves Sacramento and has to go back to non-work. There is a bright side for Republicans , though: at least Philip Chen and Steve Tye will be enjoying this!
What a dummy