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>Update on California "Violent" Games Law
>As we reported here back in February, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confirmed a district judge’s 2007 ruling that a California law that restricts sales of “violent” video games to minors is unconstitutional. The Ninth Circuit found the law unconstitutional because it was not narrowly tailored, because treating violence as obscenity is not permissible by the Constitution and because the state had not demonstrated that violent video games cause psychological or neurological damage. After the law was defeated at the Ninth Circuit, Governor Schwarzenegger announced the filing of a petition for certiorari, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to save the law, arguing that the same justifications for precluding sales of pornography to minors should be applied to violent video games. “By prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children under the age of 18 and requiring these games to be clearly labeled, this law… Continue Reading
>And like that… poof. It’s gone.
>The governer of Utah decided that the Utah HB governing the sale of age-rated games (see my earlier post) was a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Thus, the governor vetoed the bill.
>Ninth Circuit Declines to "Boldly Go Where No Court Has Gone Before"
>Proponents of free speech through the arts earned a victory on February 20, 2009, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confirmed a California district judge’s 2007 ruling that a California law that restricts sales of “violent video games” to minors is unconstitutional.Chapter 638 of the Statutes of 2005, otherwise known as “AB 1179,” was passed by the California state legislature in October 2005. AB 1179 imposes restrictions on the sale and rental of violent video games to anyone under the age of 18. The act defines a “violent video game” as, among other things, making available the option of “killing, maiming dismembering or sexually assaulting” a human or substantially human game character if doing so appeals to a “deviant or morbid interest of minors” or is done in an “especially heinous, cruel, or depraved” manner. Such games must also be labeled with two-inch by two-inch… Continue Reading
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