SCOOP: Before launching its digital rips product, PrizePicks sent a briefing to every state attorney general and met with gambling regulators to share what they were planning. It was a proactive move to assuage concerns that digital rips could be considered gambling, and may have helped lay the groundwork for broader gambling industry adoption of digital rips. While digital rips seem to meet the standard definition of gambling—the customer pays for a random chance to win a prize of monetary value—PrizePicks' view is that they are simply digitizing the age-old practice of opening a pack of physical trading cards, which isn't considered gambling under the law. “This is much more like an e-commerce transaction than it is a form of gambling,” PrizePicks chief legal officer Jason Barclay tells me. Still, Barclay says “we recognize that anything in the sports entertainment space can be subject to abuse, can be subject to addiction.” About half of Wednesday’s press release announcing PrizePicks Packs is dedicated to consumer protection measures that come with the product: Customers need to be 18 years old and the app has built in deposit limits. Users have the option to cut themselves off, a casino-industry practice known as self-exclusion. Gambling or not, the trading card market has certainly become speculative. An index of trading card values tracked by Card Ladder is outpacing the S&P 500. Trading card manufacturers promote buying card packs in search of rare cards as if they were jackpot lottery tickets. Trying to win a rare trading card by spending $2,500 on a fantasy-sports app might seem strange to some. But as an @EilersKrejcik report points out, “A generation raised on Pokémon, skins and digital goods already assigns real value to noncash assets. A $1,000 card can be a grail, a status object and an asset at once; for the right consumer, the chance to acquire it can be more compelling than an equivalent cash payout.” (video via @AldrinResearch)