Bad news for service boas, companion spiders

New regulations from the Department of Justice may at last curb demands that business owners admit an ever wider array of designated service animals as an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. ABA Journal:

Proposed revisions published in the Federal Register (PDF) would exclude not only snakes and other reptiles, but rabbits, farm animals, amphibians, ferrets, rodents and wild animals including monkeys born in captivity, according to the newspaper. They would also eliminate from the definition of service animal creatures who simply provide emotional support, comfort or companionship.

That would be a most unwelcome development to a Shelton, Wash. man who has gotten into conflicts with store and restaurant managers by bringing onto the premises the boa constrictor that he says helps alert him to impending seizures. Seattle Times:

The species are so varied that the Department of Transportation (DOT) mentioned some by name: spiders, for example, in regulations banning them from flying in aircraft cabins.

That the DOT mentioned spiders by name “means somewhere along the line, somebody brought … a service spider on the aircraft,” wrote Candy Harrington, editor of Emerging Horizons, a magazine for disabled travelers, in her blog.

The Department has received thousands of letters supporting the animal owners’ case, though. More on service animals here.

“Where did you get that keychain?”

[Bumped Monday a.m. with added links for readers who missed it on Friday]

My new article on the Federal Trade Commission’s very bad new rules on endorsements and social media is now up at City Journal.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the FTC held a conference call for reporters to dismiss concerns as unfounded. “They are not rules and regulations, and they don’t have the force of law,” said Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection — which may be narrowly true but is hollow reassurance at best, since the guidelines plainly are meant to signal where the commission intends to aim its future enforcement efforts, and since not all bloggers will be willing to defy the guidelines on the assumption that courts will refuse to go along with the FTC’s interpretations.

“We are not going to be patrolling the blogosphere,” Engle also claimed. “We are not planning on investigating individual bloggers.” And: “We’re not interested in playing gotcha in the gray areas.” And yet the guidelines are again and again written in such a way as to reserve the Commission’s discretion to do any and all of these things. Ann Althouse, as before, is rightly scornful:

Oh, good. You’re not planning…

I’m so relieved.

“We’re not interested in playing gotcha in the gray areas.”

Not yet. But once the law is on the books, will you never feel tempted? Nothing will motivate you to venture into the gray?

Of course the FTC, like other regulatory agencies, is frequently drawn into enforcement not because it has been patrolling some area as such, but because some interested party (a competitor, a disgruntled employee, an ideological critic, a litigation opponent) calls the attention of enforcement staff (or the press) to the purported violation. Is the FTC really saying, “Yes, we’ve declared blogging in such-and-such a manner to be illegal, but we’re planning to look the other way?”

More on the rules: New York Times (reactions in world of online fashion journalism); Dear Author (new rules “will be rife with abuse and misuse and uneven application”); David Johnson/Digital Media Lawyer; BNA TechLaw (endorsing agency reassurances); Robert Siegel, Mind Your Own Damn Business Politics (guidelines “might bite traditional media after all”).

P.S. Randall Rothenberg of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group, notes that in recent days “the FTC has been furiously backtracking about their implications, in an apparent attempt to soothe the blogosphere”, but calls the reassurances “disingenuous”. More: PaidContent.org (IAB considers the rules constitutionally dubious under First Amendment); Ars Technica. And some more new links:

  • According to one report from a children’s literature conference, the FTC’s Engle says Amazon bookstore arrangements must be re-disclosed anew with each linked post, but — in a seeming departure from what colleague Cleland said a week ago — otherwise “independent” book reviewers need not disclose free review copies [A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy]
  • Gordon Crovitz in Monday’s WSJ (FTC backtracking in face of reaction; “Do employees of a company have to disclose the fact of their employment every time they comment on its products through their personal Facebook accounts?”)

CPSIA chronicles, October 19

More background reading on the Draconian consumer product safety law:

  • Fear of losing even more high-quality German toy suppliers [Kathy + Matt Take Milwaukee]
  • Mattel will pay $13 million to 20 plaintiff’s firms TheTown2to resolve class action over toy recalls; claimed value of settlement to class (vouchers, etc.) is something like $37 million [National Law Journal, Coughlin Stoia release; earlier] Note also Rick Woldenberg’s March analysis of one recall (recall of 436,000 units premised on two cans of bad paint).
  • New law “has added several new tasks [to the CPSC], many of which most charitably can be described as marginal in the overall pursuit of product safety that will divert staff and financial resources from more important safety issues.” [attorney Michael Brown, quoted at Handmade Toy Alliance Blog]
  • Alarmist reporting on Boston’s WBZ affords a glimpse of MaryHadLamb2“the scary people behind the law” [Woldenberg]
  • Effort to help move blogger Kevin Drum up the CPSIA learning curve [Coyote]
  • “The “Resale Round-up,” launched by the CPSC, finally limits the power of these merchants of death who recklessly barter second-hand toys to unsuspecting civilians at low prices…. The only question now is how did any of us survive this long?” [David Harsanyi, Denver Post]
  • Among its other effects, the statute “will boost opportunities for mass-tort suits” [Crain’s Chicago Business]
  • Law’s “continuing disaster for small business” illustrates MaryHadLamb3difference between crony capitalism and the real kind [James DeLong, The American, with kind words for a certain “indispensable” website that’s covered the law]

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGES from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.