[greenlander]

Think Computer Corporation has documented their dispute with the State of California in great detail, including scans of all the physical correspondence.

https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html

If you read through the history, it's pretty clear that Think Computer Corporation got screwed by California. California classified him as a money transmitter, but refused to clearly define the bar needed for him to become one. It's obviously a case of favoring the big guy for now reason. Facebook and BoA can be money transmitters, because they're big. You're not big, you're a scrub, now go to get job at Facebook like the other scrubs. Obviously, this latest lawsuit makes him look like an obnoxious dickhead. I can nevertheless sympathize with his action here, which is to lash out at an obviously unfair system.

[wmf]

And yet somehow their competitors are still in business.

[lisper]

In large part because they chose to flout the law, and California chose not to prosecute them (yet). Be careful before you celebrate people who succeed because they choose to break the law. It's a very slippery slope.

[7Figures2Commas]

I don't think this is necessarily a fair assessment.

In my brief reading the documents at the link referenced above, it appears that the author originally contacted the state of California, believing that he may be subject to the Money Transmission Act (MTA) based on his reading of the law. In his initial correspondence, he asks for clarification: is he actually engaged in operating a money transmission service, or is he an exempt payment processor?

That seems like a simple question but the bureaucrats he's dealing with don't provide an answer. Instead, they appear to latch on to his correspondence and treat it as a representation that he is engaged in money transmission and therefore subject to the MTA. That's not exactly surprising: if he is subject to the MTA, there's a license involved, which generates revenue for the state.

This leaves an interesting unanswered question: was the author ever subject to the law in the first place? Perhaps the competitors who you suggest are flouting the law brought the matter to their legal counsel, who concluded that they were exempt. That doesn't mean that they aren't, but the lack of prosecutions hints that this isn't an unreasonable possibility.

One final comment about breaking the law: financial services are highly regulated and given the number of laws and regulations at the federal and state levels, I don't think any company in this space can ever be certain that it is not breaking some law. One thing is for sure however: if you're running a financial services company and have questions about a law, allowing legal counsel to research the matter and handle any correspondence with regulators is the best approach.

[lisper]

> was the author ever subject to the law in the first place? Perhaps the competitors who you suggest are flouting the law brought the matter to their legal counsel, who concluded that they were exempt.

You can read the law and decide for yourself. The text is actually fairly clear: if you receive money from one party for the purpose of transmitting it to another party then you need a license.

[7Figures2Commas]

Reading laws and trying to determine what they mean when you are not an attorney is a dangerous pastime.

[mindcrime]

That tells us something about the nature of what passes for "law" in contemporary times, doesn't it? I mean, there's no particular reason that every single citizen shouldn't understand what is and what isn't illegal, without any need for a specialized class of judges, lawyers, etc. to interpret, debate, spin and mangle things.

Limit the scope of government very narrowly, to about what Bastiat argued for[1] and a lot of this problem would go away.

[1]: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html