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Madison Square Garden’s Facial Recognition-Enabled Bans Now Being Targeted By Legislators, State AG

from the yet-another-problematic-use-of-the-tech dept

Late last year, it was revealed that MSG Entertainment (the owner of several New York entertainment venues, including the titular Madison Square Garden) was using its facial recognition tech to, in essence, blacklist its owner’s enemies.

Those targeted included lawyers working for firms currently engaged in litigation against MSG Entertainment. Owner James Dolan, through his company’s PR wing, stated these bans were meant to prevent adversarial litigants from performing ad hoc discovery by snooping around arenas under the auspices of event attendance.

That might have made sense if it only targeted lawyers actually involved in this litigation. But these blanket bans appeared to deny access to any lawyer employed by these firms, something that resulted in a woman being unable to attend a Rockettes performance with her daughter and her Girl Scout troop, and another lawyer being ejected from a Knicks game.

These facial recognition-assisted bans immediately became the subject of new litigation against MSG Entertainment. Some litigants were able to secure a temporary injunction by reaching deep into the past to invoke a 1941 law enacted to prevent entertainment venues from banning entertainment critics from attending events.

The restraining orders were of limited utility, though. Some affected lawyers still found themselves prevented from entering despite carrying copies of the injunction with them. And the law itself has a pretty significant loophole: it does not cover sporting events, which are a major part of MSG Entertainment’s offerings.

While possibly legal (given that private companies can refuse service to anyone [for the most part]), it was also stupid. It looked more vindictive than useful, with owner James Dolan punishing anyone who had the temerity to be employed by law firms that dared to sue his company. It’s robber baron type stuff and it never plays well anywhere, which you’d think someone involved in the entertainment business would have realized.

Now, the government is coming for Dolan and his facial recognition tech-based bans. As Jon Brodkin reports for Ars Technica, the state attorney general’s office is starting to ask some serious questions.

[AG Letitia] James’ office sent a letter Tuesday to MSG Entertainment, noting reports that it “used facial recognition software to forbid all lawyers in all law firms representing clients engaged in any litigation against the Company from entering the Company’s venues in New York, including the use of any season tickets.”

“We write to raise concerns that the Policy may violate the New York Civil Rights Law and other city, state, and federal laws prohibiting discrimination and retaliation for engaging in protected activity,” Assistant AG Kyle Rapiñan of the Civil Rights Bureau wrote in the letter. “Such practices certainly run counter to the spirit and purpose of such laws, and laws promoting equal access to the courts: forbidding entry to lawyers representing clients who have engaged in litigation against the Company may dissuade such lawyers from taking on legitimate cases, including sexual harassment or employment discrimination claims.”

The AG’s office also expressed its concerns about facial recognition tech in general, noting it’s often “plagued with biases and false positives.” It’s a legitimate concern, but perhaps AG James should cc the NYPD, which has been using this “plagued with bias” tech for more than a decade.

Dolan/MSG’s plan to keep booting lawyers from venues is now facing another potential obstacle. City legislators are prepping an amendment that would pretty much force MSG to end this practice.

“New Yorkers are outraged by Madison Square Garden booting fans from their venue simply because they’re perceived as corporate enemies of James Dolan,” the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, told the Daily News.

“This is a straightforward, simple fix to the New York State civil rights law that would hopefully prevent fans from being denied entry simply because they work for a law firm that may have a client in litigation against Madison Square Garden Entertainment,” he added.

It is a simple fix. The bill would take the existing 1941 law — the one forbidding entertainment venues from banning critics — and close the sporting event loophole. That would pretty much cover everything hosted by MSG, which would make Dolan’s ban plan unenforceable.

Of course, none of this had to happen. If Dolan and MSG were having problems with adversarial lawyers snooping around their venues, they could bring this to the attention of the courts handling these cases. A blanket ban of entire law firms did little more than anger the sort of people you generally don’t want to piss off when there’s litigation afoot: lawyers. What looked like a cheap and punitive win now looks like a PR black eye coupled with a brand new litigation headache.

Filed Under: facial recognition, james dolan, lawsuits, lawyers, letitia james, new york
Companies: msg entertainment

Lawyers Blocked From Entering Madison Square Garden By Vindictive Owner Use 1941 Law To Bypass Bullshit Ban

from the if-there's-one-thing-lawyers-know,-it's-laws dept

There are lots of ways facial recognition tech can be misused. Since it’s far from infallible, the most common misuse of the tech is accepting matches as statements of fact. What should be considered, at best, an investigative lead, has instead been used to wrongly arrest people for crimes they didn’t commit.

The private sector has access to the same tech. But it’s not subject to even the minimal guidelines applied to government deployment. Businesses have the right to refuse service to anyone, but even that blanket statement has exceptions.

Even if you have the leeway to ban people from your premises, the question remains whether you should do so, especially when the bans appear to be vindictive. Earlier this month, some New York City lawyers reported they were being blocked from entering venues operated by MSG Entertainment, the company that owns Madison Square Garden and other city entertainment venues. These bans — enforced by MSG’s use of facial recognition tech — prevented a mother from joining her daughter and her Girl Scout troop during a visit to Radio City Music Hall. Another lawyer was booted from a Knicks game at the Garden after being flagged by MSG’s tech.

This entirely new problem could be traced back to MSG’s chief executive, James L. Dolan. Last summer, he instituted a ban affecting lawyers working for firms engaged in litigation against MSG Entertainment. The ban was supposed to prevent adversarial lawyers from engaging in freelance discovery while attending events. The problem was the ban targeted all lawyers at these firms, rather than just those actually engaging in litigation.

These blanket bans are generating even more litigation (which will, of course, generate more bans, etc.). But some enterprising lawyers working for firms shortsightedly targeted by MSG’s bans have found a way to get back into these venues. Unsurprisingly, it involves a law — and a rather old law at that, as Kashmir Hill reports for the New York Times.

In the late 1930s, Leonard Lyons, a columnist for the New York Post, was barred from “30-odd theaters,” he said in a column, because he had written nasty things about the Shubert family, including a story about the theater owners charging a playwright $7 to hang curtains in his dressing room, which the playwright spitefully paid in pennies.

Mr. Lyons, who had a law degree himself according to his son Jeffrey, consulted an A.C.L.U. lawyer, Morris Ernst, who informed him that “the Woollcott decision was binding,” as he later wrote in his column, The Lyons Den. “The law’s against you,” Mr. Ernst said, “unless you change the law.”

And so Mr. Ernst drafted a law guaranteeing anyone over the age of 21 admittance to “legitimate theaters, burlesque theaters, music halls, opera houses, concert halls and circuses,” with exceptions for abusive or offensive behavior, and he and Mr. Lyons persuaded a state representative from Manhattan to push it forward. It was signed into law in April 1941 despite Lee Shubert sending a letter to the governor objecting that it was a “one man” bill, intended to protect Mr. Lyons’s ability “to find some additional material which can form the basis of further attacks on Messrs. Shubert.”

The law stopped entertainment venues from blocking access to critics. The law is still on the books and lawyers affected by the MSG Entertainment ban utilized the 80-year-old law to secure an injunction forbidding these venues from denying them access. The venues can still refuse to sell blacklisted lawyers tickets, but they can’t prevent them from entering if they hold valid tickets. Of course, having an injunction in hand doesn’t mean venue operators or their security teams won’t immediately violate the court order.

After a preliminary injunction was granted in November, Mr. Noren tried to go to a Wizkid concert at Madison Square Garden. Despite bringing a printout of the judge’s order granting the preliminary injunction, he was stopped and turned away by security officials, an encounter he recorded on his smartphone.

You can’t litigate in a venue vestibule, so that means Dolan and his company can continue to score unearned wins. And the application of the law doesn’t mean automatic entry to every event hosted by MSG Entertainment. A carve out for sporting events in the 1941 law means the previously banned lawyers can attend concerts and shows, but can still be legally refused entry to Knicks games.

This whole debacle highlights yet another problematic aspect of facial recognition tech: it can be used to engage in new forms of discrimination, allowing business owners to effectively ban people they just don’t like, whether they’re lawyers working for adversarial law firms, or people who just don’t fit the preferred demographic the venue/store/etc. wishes to attract. Enacting petty bans because tech makes it that much easier to enforce is just going to invite litigation, legislation, and negative press — something no company should welcome or encourage if it wants to remain solvent.

Filed Under: facial recognition, james dolan, lawyers, new york, theaters
Companies: msg, msg entertainment

Madison Square Garden’s Facial Recognition Tech Boots Lawyers Litigating Against The Venue

from the ejecting-your-enemies-under-the-guise-of-venue-safety dept

A private company can legally declare it has the right to refuse service to anyone (with a very small number of limitations under the law, mostly around discrimination against protected classes). The application of facial recognition tech makes it much easier to do. Rather than post photos and bad checks on the back wall to inform employees who isn’t welcome, companies can utilize tech companies and their databases of unknown provenance to make these calls for them.

MSG Entertainment — the company running New York’s Madison Square Garden and other venues — has chosen to turn over its doorman duties to facial recognition tech. Setting aside the fact (for the sake of argument) that this tech tends to subject minorities and women to higher rates of false positives/negatives, recent events at MSG Entertainment-owned venues suggest maybe it’s not a wise idea to do certain things just because you can.

For instance, this mini-debacle, which involved separating a mother from her Girl Scout daughter when both were trying to attend a show at Radio City Music Hall:

Kelly Conlon and her daughter came to New York City the weekend after Thanksgiving as part of a Girl Scout field trip to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas Spectacular show. But while her daughter, other members of the Girl Scout troop and their mothers got to go enjoy the show, Conlon wasn’t allowed to do so.

That’s because to Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Conlon isn’t just any mom. They had identified and zeroed in on her, as security guards approached her right as he got into the lobby.

Conlon was approached by security, who told her the facial recognition system had flagged her. They asked for identification and then proceeded to eject her from the venue. No explanation was given, but Kelly Conlon has reason to believe the ejection was personal.

“They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. And they told me I was not allowed to be there,” said Conlon.

Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.

Was Conlon reading too much into this? If this were an isolated incident, the answer might be “possibly.” But Conlon isn’t the only lawyer working for a firm involved in litigation against MSG that has been refused entry by the company’s facial recognition tech:

A Long Island attorney says he was kicked out of a Knicks game after getting flagged by facial recognition technology at Madison Square Garden — the same system the company used to boot another lawyer from a Rockettes show.

“I was upset — we had a whole night planned out that got botched,” said lawyer Alexis Majano, 28. “I said, ‘This is ridiculous.’”

Majano — whose law firm has a pending lawsuit against Madison Square Garden Entertainment in an unrelated matter — was headed into the game against the Celtics with pals on Nov. 5 when he was stopped on an escalator, he said.

Majano works for law firm Sahn Ward Braff Koblenz. The firm recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of a person who fell from a skybox at Madison Square Garden while attending a concert. He’s just one of several lawyers who have apparently been banned from attending events hosted by MSG Entertainment simply because they work for firms engaged in litigation against the company.

These bans are now leading to lawsuits. And these lawsuits target ejections dating back to this summer, when lawyers started to notice a strange pattern of ejections targeting members of law firms engaged in litigation targeting MSG Entertainment.

While private companies do retain the right to refuse service to anyone for nearly any reason, the question being asked is whether being adjacent to litigation is a legal reason to refuse service, especially since the ejections occur after MSG Entertainment has already chosen to sell tickets to people it then ejects when they arrive to make use of their purchased goods.

Legal or not, the optics are terrible. Not that it appears to matter to the person running the company.

Its chief executive, James L. Dolan, is a billionaire who has run his empire with an autocratic flair, and his company instituted the ban this summer not only on lawyers representing people suing it, but on all attorneys at their firms. The company says “litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment” and so it is enforcing the list with the help of computer software that can identify hundreds of lawyers via profile photos on their firms’ own websites, using an algorithm to instantaneously pore over images and suggest matches.

It’s a free market. There’s no Constitutionally-guaranteed right to event attendance. Private companies can, for the most part, pick and choose who they want to do business with. But deploying unproven tech with a proven track record of being wrong far too often puts people at the mercy of both billionaires and whatever method they’ve picked to increase ejection efficiency. If MSG is concerned lawyers might be trying to gain an edge by attending events simply to do some snooping, it seems it might be able to find a court-based solution that serves this purpose.

This is a bad look for MSG, even if it’s completely legal. It indicates it doesn’t have much confidence in its defense against these lawsuits. It also indicates the facial recognition tech systems aren’t there to ensure public safety, but rather to allow MSG Entertainment to refuse entry to anyone it considers to be an enemy. And if it continues to work this well, it will encourage other businesses to do the same thing: silence critics by simply refusing to allow them entry.

And it’s a tactic that’s pretty much guaranteed to encourage at least the state’s government — via court decisions or legislation — to issue mandates that restrict the private rights of businesses. In the long run, this probably isn’t going to work out for MSG’s management. And, until it’s all settled, the company can continue to punish its perceived enemies for committing the offense of providing legal services to people who feel they’ve been wronged by MSG Entertainment. If MSG wants to prove it’s in the right, let it do it in court. Deploying sketchy tech to blacklist people who’ve never violated any venue rules is a terrible way to handle a “problem” that appears to only exist in the mind of the MSG’s owner.

Filed Under: ejected, facial recognition, james dolan, lawyers, msg
Companies: msg, msg entertainment