America’s intrastate online gambling operators are celebrating a federal court ruling that restricts the scope of the Wire Act to interstate sports betting.

On Monday, US District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro issued a ruling striking down the new opinion on the scope of the 1961 Wire Act – which prohibits the interstate transmission of wagering information – issued last year by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

The DOJ’s new opinion claimed that the Wire Act applied to nearly all forms of online gambling. That directly contradicted the DOJ’s 2011 opinion on the same subject, which declared that the Wire Act applied only to sports betting, paving the way for several states to launch intrastate online casino, poker and lottery markets.

The New Hampshire Lottery Commission (NHLC) challenged that opinion, arguing that the DOJ’s new catch-all position threatened its online lottery sales and possibly even land-based sales of Powerball tickets. The DOJ tried to argue that the NHLC lacked standing to challenge the new opinion because the text didn’t explicitly target state lottery operations.