Getting Your Drink On(line)
Today's St. Paul Pioneer Press has a story that undoubtedly has the guys at Modern Drunkard crying in their beers:
It's legal in Minnesota to order wine directly from a winery, but it's not legal for the winery to advertise that you can do so. A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis Wednesday wants to overturn that law.The suit also complains it's illegal for Minnesotans to buy wine from a winery over the Internet, even though you can order it online from a liquor store.
The law is supposed to prevent sales to minors. But Fieldstone Vineyards, of Morgan, Minn., White Winter Winery, of Iron River, Wis. and Kimberly Crockett, a wine enthusiast from Deephaven, said it violates their freedom of speech and hurts small wineries.
While I'm not excited about on-line liquor sales, I do appreciate why the plaintiff's think it inconsistent to allow someone to buy online from a liquor store, a retailer, but not from a winery, the producer. That said, I must confess to being mystified by one aspect of their argument, specifically the part about the violation of their freedom of speech. I know very little about constitutional law, I have never been impressed by arguments that equate commreical speech with free speech. If bans against cigarette and hard liquor advertising have been upheld, I can't see why the same shouldn;t or couldn't hold for the advertisement of wine.
On the other hand, the promise of e-commerce and online retailing is that it is supposed to allow local and regional producers and retailers access to global markets. There is no counting the number of business that have found a new lease on life because the web provided them the ability to offer their goods and services to the world, not just their own backyards.
The practical problem arising from this is the fact that businesses that do business both in a locality and via the web are always based somewhere. As such, they are subject to the rules and regulations of the jurisdiction within which they abide. Business practices that are not legal in their home area may be perfetly legal in the areas where customers reside. It is understandable why you would want businesses to abide by the laws in their home countries, states, counties and cities. Yet, from a business standpoint, it may be irrelevant and/or impractical.
But then again, a state of affairs where businesses (people) sell (buy) things over the web that are legal where they live but not where they sell (buy) them is a state of affairs that is ripe for abuse and which would undoubtedly invite more rather than less regulation and prohibitions. That is, of course, undesirable and, as you have no doubt noticed if you read this far, probably how the problem got started. Going around in circles like this is enough to make even a non-drinker like myself fail a field sobriety test.