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Hard to believe? Possession of a pinball machine is still a first-degree misdemeanor where I live.

https://codes.forchagrin.com/chapters/chapter-715-coin-opera...




I have to wonder if this applies to private collectors. As drafted, it sounds like removing the coin mechanism[0] would be enough to dodge the ban if you just happened to have a pinball machine collection for private use.

Though the idea of police officers raiding someone's pinball machine collection sounds both hilarious and heinously overreaching at the same time.

[0] To be clear, this law probably would apply to freeplay arcades that charge for entry and electronic arcade money systems like Intercard's swipers or the ones that operate on save data cards in Japan.


I'd argue that you don't really need to remove the coin mechs if you set the machines to freeplay. And maybe that you could charge admission to get into an area with machines on freeplay.

I might not be willing to bet my machines on it, though. Although I would be highly amused to be legally declared a nuisance. :D


The law probably only applies if you upset the police or otherwise annoy someone in charge.


Did you put this together? It looks great. The site our village uses to host its village code is an atrocity so I’ve been considering rolling my own unofficial version.


I did, thank you!

Our official code is hosted by American Legal Publishing [1], but it's so bad that I decided to download a copy and try hosting my own.

After I was elected to our village council I started to notice the similarities between legal code and computer code – large amounts of plain text, formatting, and change management.

I ended up using Markdown with some special CSS styling, and the site is generated by Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. BBEdit and regex was a huge help to whip it into shape.

You are welcome to use anything I've done [2]. I would love to see more people doing the same.

[1] https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/chagrinfalls/latest/ov...

[2] https://github.com/briandrum/codes.forchagrin.com


Lots have heard "code is law".

Fewer have noticed "law is code".


The GitHub repo is 404ing. Maybe it's set to be private?


Fixed, thank you.


Haha, yep. Ours is American Legal Publishing, too.




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