Supreme Court Strikes Down California’s Violent Video Games Law
That giant sigh of relief you just heard came from the video game industry, as the Supreme Court struck down California’s anti-violent video game law, which prohibited the sale or rental of violent games to anyone under 18. Retailers who violated the law would be fined $1,000 for each instance.
In a fairly definitive 7-2 ruling, the court upheld the ruling of Sacramento’s 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the law violated both the 1st and 14th Amendment rights of minors.
More than 46 million American households have at least one video-game system, with the industry bringing in at least $18 billion in sales during 2010, the Associated Press reports.
Like the old maxim, “As California goes so does the country.” If the law was upheld, it could have potentially devastated the video game industry if other states followed suit.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion for the court, and oddly, it was Justices Clarence Thomas (bucking the old maxim “As Scalia goes so does Thomas”) and Stephen Breyer who were the dissenting justices in The State of California vs. The Entertainment Merchants Association and the Entertainment Software Association.
The ruling reads in part: “Video games qualify for First Amendment protection. Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium. And ‘the basic principles of freedom of speech… do not vary’ with a new and different communication medium.”
The California law “wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children,” the ruling read. “That is unprecedented and mistaken.”
Kotaku offers a bit of background on California’s now-unconstitutional law:
California’s attempt to criminalize violent games got further than others. The law was written by California assemblyman and child psychologist Leland Yee and signed into law by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yee’s law borrowed the language of the Miller Test, a set of criteria established by the Supreme Court in 1973 for determining if forms of speech are obscene and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. Short of establishing a class of obscene video games that would be illegal for any American, Yee’s law would build on the Supreme Court precedent for allowing states to make the sale of certain kinds of pornographic content—adult magazines, for example—illegal when sold to children, while remaining legal if sold to adults.
Games violating Yee’s law would be any that:
(A) Comes within all of the following descriptions:
(i) A reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors.
(ii) It is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors.
(iii) It causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
(B) Enables the player to virtually inflict serious injury upon images of human beings or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner which is especially heinous, cruel, or depraved in that it involves torture or serious physical abuse to the victim.
This marks the first time the Supreme Court has ruled on video games, and now, because of this decision, it seems that video games have earned an equal place at the First Amendment cultural table along with books, music, movies and other entertainment products.
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