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Grand Theft Auto Ban To Be Decided By Courts
Wingchild writes "Haitian civil rights groups in Florida have filed a lawsuit with the circuit court in Palm Beach County, which Rockstar Games has asked to be moved up to a federal court for a final decision on whether or not their game has to be banned from stores. This move happens as the court of media opinion begins weighing in on the subject (facts irrelevant, of course), a fact which Slashdot Games noted a scant two days ago."
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Parents should just do their job.
AC
People are getting to dang PC if they can't seperate the goings on within a game to what's actually going on in real life. This does need to be allowed to stay in stores if for nothing else then for free speech. If a particular retailer doesn't want to sell it than so be it, but an all out ban on a game being sold is stupid.
Yet if all of the game's anti-Haitian material was put into a book, people would call it free speech...
True story.
I was thinking about selling my copies of GTA on ebay. However, if it's going to be banned, it's soon going to be worth a mint.
Maybe I should wait, huh?
AC
Anyone who is famillar with the florida courts can understand why Rockstar Games wants the lawsuit moved to the federal system.
This case illustrates a deeper problem. The very nature of the legal system lets irate idiots inflict a death of a thousand cuts. There is no barrier to be overcome to bring a lawsuit. No penalty for bringing a frivolous lawsuit. Just the sound of society grinding down, under the weight of too many lawyers.
Slashdot can REALLY get on my fucking nerves now and then. I think I'm going to have to use a Louisville slugger to beat this point into the editors' and submitters' thick skulls...
The NY Post is NOT a credible news source. The NY Post is a TABLOID RAG that INTENTIONALLY writes up utterly ridiculous bullshit for the sole purpose of entertaining and/or selling magazines (and, it might be noted that the NY Post sells like week old baked horseshit, and for good reason).
I'm in Pennsylvania and they sell the NY Post here. However, they pull a dirty trick - most places put it with the regular newspapers instead of with crap like National Inquirer and Weekly World News. Then, people buy it and mistake it for upstanding journalism with some level of integrity. They wrote the piece to incite people. I mod the entire NY Post staff, and the writer of that article in particular, with -1 Flamebait.
PLEASE stop thinking that the NY Post is a newspaper. It is a tabloid, nothing more. It doesn't represent popular opinion, and, in fact, when they write garbage like that, it doesn't even necessarily represent the NY Post's opinion. It's JUST A TABLOID.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Dear Mr. Byron,
I recently read your business editorial in the December 29 issue of the New York Post. I am glad to see that you are open to letters and responses concerning your rather harsh defamation of Take Two Interactive. Many in your position prefer to hide in semi-anonymity when writing such provocative words, but you rather than do so have included your e-mail address. I do admire your ability to present an argument irrespective of what I hold as my own position.
I am an average man living a rather average life in Toronto, Canada. I was born here, raised here and love living with the freedoms I have. Freedoms my grandfather fought for in the Second World War. I am a professional computer programmer and part-time philosophy major at The University of Toronto. I enjoy writing and reading among my hobbies. I am a very evident pacifist. I deplore guns. I despise violence. I am so against it that I can hardly stand to watch the news.
You may wonder why on Earth I was even reading your editorial at all. Well, the fact is, I am also an avid gamer. As you may have soon realized, as no doubt you have received many similar letters from other video game fans from around the USA and the World at large. A link to your article has been making the rounds through the gaming news world. After all, we are a passionate bunch, with strong views about our favourite hobby and many of us will defend our Right to purchase, play, and discuss video games of all sorts. It seems fair, if you ask me, since we do live in The Free World.
Now discounting the SEC's charges of fraud, of which I cannot really make any sort of argument against, I would like to take a serious posture against what you have said. I take issue with your skewed portrayal of video games, video gamers and the state of Take Two's production values. I am very tired of defending the video game world to obviously ignorant individuals. Not to take it personally against you, after all, you do seem highly educated, but rather misinformed. We must stop riding the Scare Tactics Train to the Media Circus surrounding many recent real-world violent acts through out the World and domestically and start taking a hard look at the real reason that they happen. Video games are not it.
I will grant the accusation that Take Two's Grand Theft Auto series of games depicts violent acts. If I attempted to deny such a fact would be just outrageous and quite impossible to do. Also the fact that much of the line-up of games that they produce for the Playstation 1 and 2, Gameboy, and PC contain some violent content would be equally difficult to ignore as fact. What I do want to say is that this is no different from the equally easily accessible media in the Western world such as movies and television and in books and newspapers.
Each year, from the hallowed studios of Hollywood, billions of dollars are spent on thousands of movies depicting gore, violent acts, sex, drug use, and all manner of objectionable activity that is portrayed in less detail in any of the recent Grand Theft Auto video games. To name only a few such as The Godfather would be an exercise in futility as examples of such films. Yet the same such movie is lauded as one of the all-time greatest movies.
In fact, just checking the heralded internet resource, imdb.com ( http://imdb.com/top_250_films ) names it the greatest by almost 700,000 more votes than its runner-up. In fact, a quick browse of the same list makes it evident that they find violent films to be quite highly regarded. It includes recent action flicks such as The Matrix, adventure films as The Lord of the Rings and older suspense movies such as Psycho and "Ultra-violent" dramas such as A Clockwork Orange. It would be quite arguable that these same movies are not as high quality as we grant them, and they all feature extremely graphic violence and other objectionable acts.
Yes, these movies are all rated R (Restricted) in the USA. The film industry is self-regulating in it's r
Paul K.
"Kill these particular Hatians, but treat all other Hatians with dignity and respect!"
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
I should be suing the HBO for the soprano's, I should sue MGM for the Godfather, I should sue tristar for Goodfellas.
Every time some idiot hears that i'm italian, suddenly they start thinking i'm some stupid mafia goomba, and they start doing the whole Robert Di Nero accent when they talk to me. Fact is, I was raised in California, and so many of my family members were trying to hard to be "American" that most of them talked like John Wayne.
But I do enjoy afformentioned films and shows, as well as GTA. It's not like rockstar made a game that promotes Haitian genocide. They just did the whole voodoo momma stereotype(which *IS* a part of Haitian culture, just like the Mafia is part of my heritige)
I think these people need to get a life. It's a game, liven up.
If this issue should be decided anywhere, it should be in the marketplace, not the courts. Capitalism is a democracy in and of itself in that if something is too racist to be sold, no one will buy it and the company will either change its tactics or be put out of business. And the marketplace, unlike the courtroom or legislature, is a place where every person can cast their vote individually. Special interest lobby groups have no undue influence on the open market.
So, by spending many entertaining hours playing Vice City, all the time aware that this is fantasy and the acts I commit in the game have no bearing on my real-life conduct, I have been committing acts far worse than fucking little boys? Sheesh, I had no idea!
In fact, I wouldn't pay too much attention to the New York Post. It is, of course, another lying gutter publication from Rupert Murdoch, the bloated impotent turd who's attempts to take over the world will hopefully fail when he dies of a extremely-painfull coronary.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I've been told to kill Germans in tons of World War II games and no one's complained about that...
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
From the NY Post article:
In Tennessee last summer a motorist was killed and his passenger wounded when two boys - aged 14 and 16 - played "Grand Theft Auto" and then decided to go out and take sniper shots at cars, just like in the game.
I find it peverse that GTA is held to blame in this particular case. More to the point, what the fuck were two underage boys doing with access to shotguns?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
and secondly, commercial speech (they are selling a video game) can be highly regulated.
Bzzzt, wrong. The restrictions on commercial speech do not apply to the content of the game itself. Rockstar's commercials promoting the game, however, are subject to restrictions on commercial speech. Rockstar cannot claim, for example, that the game adds two inches to your penis, or helps you learn how to successfully deal with police.
Commercial speech has not appeared in many video games so far, and it's difficult to imagine how it really could. In Crazy Taxi, passengers get in the cab and always want to be taken to places like KFC (beautifully rendered, logo and all). If a game comes out where you have to go to KFC and gorge on buckets of greasy chicken to keep your health points from going to zero, then the game makers (along with KFC) might conceivably be playing with the possibility of commercial restrictions. But movies have been getting away with product placement payola for a while now, so I wouldn't bet on it.
That presents a real problem. Guns are very tightly regulated through legal channels. IF you wish to buy a gun from a legit dealer, you must be of proper age (18 for long guns, 21 for hand guns). When you declare your intent to purchase it, they will take your personal information, and call the police with it. The police then use that to do a background check via NICS. If that should return any number of red flags, such as being underage, have a felony conviction, having outstanding warrants, having domestic violence convictions, or having been comitted to a mental health facility, the sale will be denied.
So this means that underage kids have only two real methods of getting guns:
1) Illegal dealers.
2) Their parents.
This was a case of #2. Well then, that would mean that the parents are to blame for permitting their kids to have unsupervised access to firearms. That implies personal responsibility on the part of the parents. That is the one thing the world seems to not be about these days, is responsibility for ones own actions. Parents blame their kids behaviour on videogames or TV. Heck, leaders of dictatorships blame their countries' problem on the US.
Also note that the parents of the kids that did this don't hav a lot of money, not nearly as much as Rockstar Games does. So they are a perfect scapegoat. It's not our (our meaning parents) fault that our kids have no morals and access to weapons, it's those eveil video game companies that, conveniantly, we can try to milk for cash.
Same sort of thing happened with the firearm industry on numerous occasions. People sued firearm manufactures when a death occured and one of their guns were used. The lawsuits were almost universally unsuccessful so the shark lawyers ahve moved onto new targets, by and large, though firearm lawsuits are still tried from time to time.
If you don't like the game, DON'T BUY IT!!! Nobody's pointing a gun at you to force you to buy.
Actually, that scene is in the next version of GTA.
I help scummy lawyers get their cocaine back, and run it for the Mafia. I often stand on rooftops and snipe at passerby with a rocket launcher. I sometimes will run around city streets with a flamethrower and burn random people.
I like to run into the police station and preceeded by grenades and clean up with a machine gun. I drive on the beach and run over people who are sunbathing.
I beat most hookers with a baseball bat, take their money, and buy guns with it. I can sometimes be found running over moped riders, waiting 'til they get back on, then elbowing them in the throat and stealing their bike.
I drive on the sidewalks. On golf courses. In parks and malls. I run over anyone I see. If I'm on foot, I'll run up to someone and kick them in the head. Sometimes I'll beat them until the blood spreads in a spreading pool.
I blame my parents.
I feel that a large part of the issue here is that all the parents of children who do these things is that the parents don't get involved in their lives, so in a somewhat desperate cry for attention, or perhaps to lash out at what they perceive to be a society that carries no love for them they act out the one thing that brings them comfort; a violent video game. While I don't think that the games are entirely to blame, I'm sure that with access to firearms and other weapons they would be quite capable of finding source material in movies or TV, the issue at the heart of all of this is parental involvement, moreso the appalling lack thereof which has come to be the norm in todays society.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
As a resident of South Florida, this case makes my head ache. Based on the facts of the case as I understand them, the game should not be banned, either by the government or by Walmart.
1) The offensive phrase apparently refers to a competing criminal gang made up of Haitians, not to the Haitian community in general.(?)
2) If incitement to virtual behavior that would be illegal in reality is deemed inappropriate, the entire genre of first person shooters and much of several other genres would be illegal as well.
3) If virtual child porn is legal, how can virtual racism be illegal?
On the other hand, Haitians have to be the most oppressed people in the western hemisphere. First, their home country is a wasteland, then they have to risk life and limb to get here, then (unlike Cubans) they have to hide from immigration because they don't get amnesty just for reaching shore. Finally, if they do get through all that, even African-Americans pick on them. In public HS here "Are you Haitian?" is the same as "Are you stoopid?" (see Disclaimer)
Finally, the parent comment is one of the best balanced discussions of this issue in the whole thread. It doesn't just discuss the specific issue of the lawsuit, but it addresses the broader issues of morality in media consumption.
Disclaimer: The phrase "even African-Americans" is used to indicate that this is a case of black on black racism (or nationalism), it doesn't mean "even the lowly black folks pick on the Haitians".
We are the 198 proof..
That's (part of) what conservative means.
Just because "Republican" has meant "conservative" for several generations doesn't mean they are now. Political parties change beliefs from time to time. The Republican party used to be the progressive/liberal party, if you recall.
Conservatives are stil Conservatives. Our Republican adminstration, however, isn't ver Conservative at all. Bush has a very large government that has sought to increase federal and executive power at every turn.
People need to dissociate their political beliefs from political parties. The party that used to represent what you personally believe may change to represent that which you abhor.
The downside is you don't get to vote in primaries. The updside is you can remain true to your actual beliefs, instead of subverting them to the cause of someone else.
Anyone who isn't an indepenent is a tool, or someone who wishes to wield tools.
The enemies of Democracy are
I've heard that the American-Orcish community is protesting the recent LOTR movies and video games. Apparantley it sterotypes Orcs to be ugly, misformed, drooling, fiendish blood drinking monsters.
;-)
Luckily for them, the Orcs are currently in charge of Congress so a ban on anti-Orc material should be forthcoming
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I mean, what is this? My parents educated my brothers and I very well, and when they said "Don't watch this" or "Don't play this game" because they thought that this material wasn't appropriate for us, we didn't. We learned to obey our parents, to trust their judgement even if sometimes we disagreed with them. I am now 20 years old, I am an adult, they no longer really tell me what to do or what not to do: they know that I am responsible and that I will do what is right.
So instead of asking to ban games, give better parenting lessons to the future mommies and daddies, teach them how to educate their kids, how to make them understand that some things are not for them.
Here we got GTA3 about two years ago. Me an one of my brothers were old enough to play according to my parents, but not our baby brother. It didn't please him that he couldn't play, but as far as I know, he respected our parents' decision until they said that it was okay, that he could play.
Also, once kids obey parents, it's easier to convince them that Vim is the superior editor ;)
If the Ku Klux Klan has the "right" to march down Skokie (a Chicago suburb that is home to many Holocaust survivors), then Take Two has the "right" to make Grand Theft Auto.
I don't what this game promotes and how it influences some people, but America was created with free speech in mind. Unfortunately, people with poor taste are also allowed free speech.
But then, I'm sure the British thought Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and the mighty John Hancock had poor taste and poisonous words that should be silenced.
Besides, people still make the desicion to act violently.
The problem isn't necessarily that everyone needs a cause here...it's that their causes are self-serving and inane. Very few take of the cause of, say, ousting corrupt politicians or punishing dishonest corporate offices. For some reason they take on causes like banning a video game or a book because it offends their sensibilities. (Yet somehow being taken advantage of by those in power doesnt offend them) I'm not sure exactly why this is.
But yes, you're right on the money. If folks would mind their own damn business, half this countries problems would go away. Imagine it, Political correctness and frivolous lawsuits could be a thing of the past!
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