background piling hong is a company that's in hong kong formed under british law their primary business is the buying and selling of various types of seafood products which include sanctions in this case not that they went out and bought the shark fins that the buying and selling of shark fins in this fashion was lawful they don't produced by the company that ends up selling it to the eventual goal takes it directly to market exactly don't buy real estate coffee or small coffee plantations that don't have the wherewithal to transport their crops to market so they sell it to the wholesalers little man i am not familiar with that either because i'm on  at the ultimate store no i don't think so because and again i think you have to look at the specific language of the shark finning probation act along with the language from the federal register that cited on pa or if i'm coming out with my own vessel and you say to me i need you to take some of my product in or i need you to process some of my fish right need you to hold some of my fish because i'm too full of because i want to stay out that's the kind of support services that are referred to in the statute and the regulation i have to be out there as the mission of my vessel to support your activity specifically the story of i'm storing it for you i'm transporting it for you i'm processing it for you be serving both of our interests in effect moving the market from the dock to the middle of the ocean which seems you want to accomplish here if you look at the plain language of the regulation might what there says agent whatsoever we can't be scratching each other's backs it seems to me you're positing here that the that the the secondary valve so your client special here has to be acting intended to be for the benefit of the one that's at sea but i'm not so sure that this doesn't cover both situations obviously if you have an adjunct if if if your client were hired to come out and pick up stuff and were being paid by the fishing vessel no question it's covered that's not happening here and you're arguing that's the distinction exactly i'm trying to find what in the statute says that to be assisting somebody else means that you have to be acting as an agent or be hired by our given compensation in some way by the fishing vessel as opposed to this situation which seems to be moving the market from the dock to the middle of the ocean in order to gain a competitive advantage you're going to sell them instead of the guy at the doc take you two weeks to go to guatemala to sell the stuff and you can sell it to me right here that that can be said to assist the fishing vessel it may not be the motivation of your client but it's part of what your client uses to induce the fishing vessel to sell  those types of statements is there is no evidence to show there's a time saving or benefit to answer the question you started with and the point i'm trying to make is in this statute where it gives you examples of types of activities supply in storage refrigerators transportation and in this particular case you've mentioned storage and transportation the reason why under a reasonable interpretation of the statute there has to be an agency relationship for that activities because if if i'm carrying it for the foreign fishing vessel that provided it then i'm providing storage to them i'm providing transportation to them but if i bought it and it's my product i'm not providing transportation for them i'm providing it for myself and so i'm eating and assisting that vessel by providing transportation services i'm not eating and assisting them fisheries service interpretation of the act is that it targets fishing vessels and it was not meant to interfere with international trade nationally fisheries service has drafted this fine a rule not to directly affect the owners employees of businesses that are engaged in regular domestic and international cargo shipments of and trade instructions and this was the point that i was trying to get to in response to just clifton's question which is in my my view of this case is there has to be a line drawn where trade and commerce of this product is lawful and that's what the federal register says the act was not intended nor designed to interfere with training thomas that's exactly what my client was doing there in the business of buying and selling very seafood products including shark fins they were in their mind they've hired a boat which can go out and entity to engage as the mission of the vessel providing support services as articulated in sixteen u s c eighteen zero two as the mission of the vessel and that's not what case and so that is a problem or that was a point that the underlying triad just didn't didn't see and i think that is one of the the key issues in this case is you know they're engaged in training commerce it's not only business you're quire to for the shark fins are confirmed to they deliver them to the wholesaler and the port no no no they deliver them to guatemala and then ship them back to hong kong where their offices are they process it and then they sell it to their the receiving vessel is prohibited from landing shark and with corresponding carcasses and with its final rule that's a totally different situation there are prior to the enactment of the shark finning prohibition act there used to be recipient of any x three transfers apologize that any i don't have handy both of those landed in violation of these regulations and so on of a week or so and then the paragraph that i read follows that particular paragraph so i just i'm not sure i understand what you're ten paragraphs back the fisheries service is talking about alternatives that rejected and one of it appears to be a third alternative would have extended the landing prohibition to all vessels including non fishing cargo vessels whether or not such vessels are operating in support of fishing activity twice so they could ship their cargo back to hong kong but only problem that we face in this case is the fact that there is language in the statute and the regulation that says it's unlawful to possess things if you're fishing vessel and as i argued in my brief there's both factual and a cargo vessel that wants that it has landed these pins in a us court i don't believe that language in that section of the federal register applies to my client's case which is trying to engage in trade and commerce and i think that that federal register language also has to be interpreted reasonably to assume that the cargo vessel hypoth referred to refer to that hypothetical is landing thins for the benefit for as an agent of the foreign law to interfere with the international and domestic trade and commerce and transportation of this product that's clear that's exactly what my client was doing and that's the only thing they were doing so being caught in a catch twenty two where somebody is saying yes they were engaged in trade and commerce and yes they were buying products for their own benefit and yes they weren't necessarily providing a service as an agent for you know it's that's were one of the problems lies on the legal side the statute is not clear to a reasonable person who's trying to conduct business on what is and what is not lawful conduct but i don't believe so and i wouldn't have filed an appeal leon if i didn't think that it was legitimate based on us or just right understanding thank you landed from any fishing vessel the then it goes down in the paragraph the following program that i read says the prohibition of landing short films before landing takes place bored it's focused on the landing aspect ok so here if if i take it your position would be if the king diamond had been  you may not be able to make the sale in less the king diamonds where the ships are that might not make much difference to the ships where they go to suppose for example there are themselves going out of one of all i have no idea of it's a poser or  some something on us fork where there is no legal restriction on the possession of shark fins or on marketing of shark fins and so that they could've kept those shark fins and sailed back to guatemala city or whatever the port  activity relating to fishing which is the selling and when we mustn't forget that the king diamond to have cold hard cash they say that approximately three hundred forty eight thousand dollars in cash which they supplied doesn't have to worry that storing any longer he went quietly just because this is the farmer who's in the business of whether it's coffee or oranges or whatever but the ships that are buying these shark fins are presumably not in the business of gathering fins sharks are allegedly gathered as an adjunct to some other form of fishing and the problem is they don't want to keep the carcasses the carcasses aren't useful so they hack that the ends off dump the carcasses because they're what they're really out there to catch is on the tuna with regard to where these ships would go otherwise and so i'll go back to our farmer the farmers in the business of growing coffee and why but along the way he's got a half dozen macadamia nut trees along the road and he gets a few macadamias and he doesn't really care if he tosses them in the bushel and takes them into the kailua kona or whether he somebody comes in buys them for me here that's fine it really doesn't make much difference because it's an adjunct to what he does is the farmer assisted measurably maybe a tiny little bit but that's not what the point of the transaction is and even judge moscow it says you know if you just want to go out and buy a shark fan well that wouldn't be assistance even though yeah marginally it as s the boat by buying the the couple of shark fins a consumer might want to it gets pretty murky when you don't really know what the ships are doing or where they go or what they do with the shark fins and i think that and i think that at that point we have to written this way and it turns out it appears to be written this way as part of a compromise because they didn't want to interfere with the international trade in shark fins they didn't want to send votes just to sail around our economic exclusive zone they didn't want boats coming into honolulu heart to prevent boats from coming to honolulu harbor me refit reprovision so they carved out all sorts of stuff and as you answer the question i understand the point of the statute too but i wonder if a carve out start to swallow the on a cargo of shark fins and carry it to hong kong that's more attenuated from the actual shark finning here they are right there with the banks that are participating in this act which we want to that some crackers could pick up the oranges but not others it would depend on whether they were in the case of this case foreign flag or not the only thing that is being reached here  period of time between the pickup and the landing because the landing is not illegal because it's not a us port it's only the possession intermediate position and it's only possession by a us flag ship so got guatemala would you still have been able to charge it for possession even if it had been picked up on the high seas i think there would have been some proof problems but that you would have tried to charge assuming you could right to sue not in front of the dark you saw what they were doing that would disrupt their navigation routes and be on friends from on the right of freedom of navigation and so it's beyond the intent of the act and that's what i start to be concerned about the carve outs because we're considering all these other factors and what the statute winds up covering turns out to the shark is just not profitable and that's the compromise as well you are allowed to catch shark and sell their fins but you're not allowed to have shark waste waste product and be able to carry thousands and thousands of more pounds on your ship because you don't have the best of the  the nail on the head there's no evidence on the record to reach the conclusions that judge moscowitz did in the underlying case and on the legal side of things i think the statute and with this carve out are sufficiently vague when you're looking at the conflict between encouraging trade and commerce versus what is eating and assisting acting as an agency capacity and i argue so what i would ask this court to do is two things invalidate the shark finning probation act in the limited context as i've set forth in my brief if you're not willing to do that then stand this case back down for further evidence or proceedings with some guidance on how the statutes and regulations ought to be interpreted because without that we're flying blind there was no other precedent th