Throwing the Overdue Book at 'Em ?

From the desk of The Smallest Claims Court Judge, Dee Minnie Moss, sitting in the Village Justice Court of the Village of Picayune, came an unusual masterpiece recently.

It involved a lawsuit by the Picayune Library against a patron, Casey Deetch, concerning an overdue DVD of last year's World Series Highlights-- such as they were. (You can see the Tampa Bay Rays' single victory at their website --Rays' Ipsa Loquitur). The lawsuit was to collect the fine for an overdue item-- a $1.00 a day fine for seven days from Deetch. Nowadays libraries lend out DVDs and other visual media in an attempt to stay relevant, even though it tends to discourage actual reading. They become libraries of incongruous matter. Friends of the Library, a band of citizen-patrons organized to support the library in its time of need (which is always, when it comes to libraries), occasionally volunteered to assist with administrative tasks at the library. The organization took no formal vote to do so, but, from time to time, members sent out postcards with overdue notices like the one in question that asked the purported miscreant Casey Deetch to pay up.

The defendant has a few startling assertions to make when he appeared at the bar of justice. He said it was illegal for the library to charge him anything for this overdue DVD. His argument was that a warning at the beginning of the DVD (not the FBI Warning that if you copy this DVD your name will go on the terrorist watch list--even if this is not the kind of entertainment that is on the lists of what terrorists watch) was placed there by major league baseball. It said that charging a fee for watching this video without the expressed written consent of major league baseball was prohibited. He challenged the library to come up with a letter of expressed consent authorizing it to charge him a fee.

The library countered that it was not charging him for watching the DVD--and it did not care if he watched it or not. Indeed, it preferred him to read a book. It was charging him for not returning the DVD on time.

This was a specious argument, the court ruled. If you go to a movie but you fall asleep, the court noted, you cannot get a refund on the basis that you didn't actually watch the movie, since viewing the production was your avowed intent in coming to the theater. If you take a DVD out of the library, your avowed intent is to watch it--whether or not you get around to it. If this argument were taken to its reductio ad absurdum conclusion, the library would never be able to charge overdue fines on any of the Great Books series, which patrons always take out with the best of intentions, and inevitably return unread.

Justice Moss queried, if you did not charge people to come to your bar to watch the World Series on your 56 inch flat screen HDTV with surround sound, but you charged them a fee to leave the bar, could you circumscribe the major league baseball prohibition on fee charging?

And while the case was nominally about the paltry sum seven dollars, much more could be at stake for Deetch. In Wisconsin you can be jailed for not paying your library fine, as Heidi Dalibor, seen in this mug shot was not long ago. Your credit rating can be affected if the unpaid fine is reported to an agencythat monitors deadbeats. While New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker famously said that he had never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book, some womens' credit scores have been ruined by overdue ones.

But Casey Deetch was not finished. He had a cross claim to assert against the organization that sent the postcard--the Friends of the Library. (It is not a religious organization--those Quaker "Friends" do hold services where it is as quiet as a library, and may go to the library religiously--but they are not connected with this organization.) Libraries are institutions that could use friends nowadays--what with the cuts in municipal services engendered by the recession.

Yet, there are organizations that have libraries in their gun sights--trying to snipe at them for certain controversial and suprisingly non-controversial books on the shelves that members of those groups find offensive to their morals or tastes. An entire week dedicated to banned books is a result of those people who would censor our reading. These organizations should be known as "Enemies of the Library," but aren't--yet.

Casey Deetch charged the Friends of the Library with being a debt collector under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), 15 USC Section 1692. The act prohibits, inter alia, anyone who assists a creditor from contacting a debtor using a postcard. Reluctantly, Justice Moss found the Friends of the Library guilty, and fined them seven dollars. She indicated she would stay her fine until the Friends appealed. She also noted that as an unincorporated not for profit association that had not registered under the New York Not For Profit Corporations Law, they were free to disband. Casey Deetch had only sued the organization and not its officers or members. Since unincorporated groups act only through a majority vote of their general membership, (which in this case, did not take place), there would be no entity left to pay the fine or be liable.

I would have liked to present the Justice's opinion verbatim, but she noted on the bottom of it that it could not be quoted without the expressed written consent of the the official New York State Law Reporting Bureau.