Wizards of the Coast Raids YouTuber’s House to Take Back Magic Cards

I get that the youtuber just wanted no trouble, but he may have really screwed himself by not insisting on a waver of liability, agreement that the existing videos can stay up (or, alternatively, compensation to replace the lost income from them), and compensation for his costs at a minimum.

Handing WOTC's paid thugs the material probably didn't do anything to reduce his risk and took away the little leverage he had -- they could even try to spin his willingness to hand it over as an admission that his possession was unlawful.

Private security appearing at your door may be intimidating, but it’s not a raid.

Threatening someone with fines or jail time, who took receipt of distributed but embargoed product, i.e. by no stretch of the imagination illegal to possess, is the sort of thing you might want to look into legal options for, though.

I always wonder about stories like this what the internal process that lead to this insane overreaction was. At some point, did someone really make the decision "lets send Pinkertons to this guy's house, risking an enormous publicity backlash"? It's easy to blame "the legal department" for stuff like this, but it seems extreme even for the most zealous attorney.

My hunch is that they probably have some kind of security contract with the Pinkertons to safeguard secrets, and the Pinkertons acted on their own. Hasbro/WotC has done some sketchy stuff recently, but this seems extreme even for them.

As would I, but the average person does not have that kind of wherewithal. It is still something we should be concerned about it, as I do not want to live in a world where this is commonplace, and I imagine you wouldn't want to either.

Yes, the Pinkertons are still a thing. There was an interesting post about them here: [1]

Some choice quotes from that thread:

They became famous when Lincoln used them as spies during the Civil War. They became infamous when American industrialists started employing them as union/labor strikebreakers & private police forces who weren’t held accountable by the US government.

For some of their most egregious examples of strike-breaking, check out their part in Carnegie’s Homestead Mill Strike & how they turned a peaceful assembly of strikers into Chicago’s Haymarket Riot.

From the US Library of Congress

What began as a detective agency in Chicago grew into a national private police force. *The Pinkertons stood against organized labor at nearly every turn* from Haymarket to Homestead and famously took down the Molly Maguires, while instilling fear in the hearts of fugitives across the country.

...

Ironically, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was a remarkably progressive organization under Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton himself only escaped dying with John Brown at Harper's Ferry due to coming down with Pneumonia just before leaving Chicago (a significant number of Brown's 19 men were Pinkerton Agents); and was a staunch, radical abolitionist and supporter of the Union throughout the Civil War. Allan Pinkerton was a fantastic detective and analyst - he was one of the the primary inspirations for both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes - Doyle didn't think one person with all those skillsets was believable (ironically, the other primary inspiration - Eugene Vidocq in France - had similar dual skillset). Under Lincoln, the Pinkertons became the prototype of the CIA, FBI, and modern Secret Service - and were fantastically good at all of them, as Pinkerton held little to traditional ideas about the capability of minorities and women, employing both enthusiastically and creating a large pool of talent as a result.

However, after the Civil War, the power of the Pinkertons in the Federal Government was a big issue for former Southern States. One of the first "Reconciliation" points was extracting the Pinkertons from their functions in the federal government. Those agents interested in investigation (including Pinkerton himself) ended up in the Justice Department and would eventually become the FBI, those in intelligence wound up under the Military as MI (later OSS and then CIA), those interested in protection joined the actual Secret Service.

. . . And those primarily interested in busting heads, became the private entity known as Pinkerton. Alan Pinkerton had mostly retired by then, and they became a sort of private army for strike-breaking and strong-arming citizens out of the way of the railroads. That's the "Pinkertons" most know, they of Western storybook bad guys and the villains of labour movements. Allan Pinkerton himself wasn't a big fan of labor unions, but only because most unions of the time were segregated, which he could not stand - but otherwise the later actions of the "Pinkertons" had little to do with his influence.

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/136zayf/whats...