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Judge Blocks Ban on Violent Video Game Sales
dada21 writes "SFGate is reporting that a federal judge recently blocked a new California law that would have banned the sale of violent video games to minors. From the article: 'Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed the bill by Assemblyman Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, to ban the sale or rental of especially violent video games to children under 18 years old unless there is parental approval. The law was to take effect Jan. 1.'"
" From the article: 'Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed the bill by Assemblyman Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, to ban the sale or rental of especially violent video games to children under 18 years old unless there is parental approval. The law was to take effect Jan. 1.'""
In other words. Parents should be responsable for their kids. So were's the problem again?
Maybe they should stop trying to censor what children can purchase and just create a law banning the sale of video games, marked rated M or Adult, from being sold.
More importantly, parents need to know what kind of games their children are playing, and there is nothing the government can legislate to do about it. (I'm in my 20s, and I can say, there are some games I see on t.v. that are so sickening, and am I correct to say that the U.S. army actually helped make it or am I mistaken?
And we know those laws are working effectively.
Well,If 'kids' are'nt allowed to buy a particular game due to age restrictions,what stops them from downloading from p2p/bittorrent?
Why does yahoo do this
Well, they're actually supposed to interpret the constitution as it is. A federal judge interprets the federal constitution, and a state judge does the same for the state constitution. In this case, the judge found the law to be unconstitutional. Is it really that simple? Judges can block laws all they want. If their only job was to 'uphold the law' then there would all of a sudden be no debate about the patriot act etc. etc. ad nauseam. The judiciary would become little more than a rubber stamp for congress and the president.
This is about deterring the production of said games. If they can't be bought by minors, then they will be pirated. This destroys the revenue stream, making it unprofitable to make such games.
Evil, huh? This is the premise of much of the censorship we see today, controlling speech through the 'think about the children!' impulse.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
...allowing the sale of violent games, Arnold decided to have a few words with the judge
"We don't allow kids to buy cigarettes or alcohol or look at pornography," he said. "There are already situations in which we as society have said we have to protect kids by limiting what they can do."
Cigarettes and alcohol don't involve speech or expression.
And as far as pornography, it may be true that Mr. Yee doesn't let his kids look at it. But that's not the constitutinal standard. The Supreme Court has already overruled the Communications Decency Act, which required adult websites to verify age before displaying any "pornographic" content.
Typical legislative mentality. Ignore the constitution... just do what makes you look good and let the courts sort it out.
The judge offerred his retort.
Gee, what would California, the home of the current movie/music industry, have against the new-coming rapidly expanding gaming industry?
Every time I see an ad campaign that is clearly and obviously (to anyone with half a brain cell or more) going to have the exact opposite effect to the one intended, I seriously wonder how mankind managed to get so far yet remain so woefully and obnoxiously stupid.
I do believe that laws that restrict smoking, porn, violent games, etc, can be made to work, work well, and work in a way that can near-universally be agreed upon as good, sensible and mature, even by the most anti-legislative, pure-blooded libertarians out there. I also believe such laws won't come from backroom deals, religious viewpoints and righteous rage. They are far more likely to come from rational and open discussions.
This law on violent games, for example, was brokered by politicians FOR politicians. The judge noted that no correlation between violence and games had been proven. Why could Californian legislators not wheel out neurologists with fMRI studies that could prove a unquestionable cause-and-effect on the mechanical level? Why could they not produce child psychologists who could produce solid, verifiable, repeatable evidence of a correlation on the behavioral level? If they'd done that, what objection could have been raised to there being some response?
They didn't, for an obvious reason. They never talked to any. They never had any data to work from, so had no data to present.
Ok, assuming we now have data that a response is required, we would now have to determine what kind of response is needed. The only people who can tell you what computers can do would be computer experts. The only people who can tell you what businesses can do would be business experts. For parents, you probably want to talk to a mix of parents and sociologists.
They didn't do any of that, either.
Once you've all that information to hand, you can distill it into a law that has a clear, firm, rational foundation that has unquestionable merit in dealing with a provable and proven problem, in a manner most likely to produce a verifiable and socially beneficial response.
Ah, well, rational legislation seems to be way beyond what we have come to expect from government. A pity, as they have no excuse whatsoever in producing anything else.
This assumes legislation is needed at all, of course. If the neurologists cannot show a mechanism AND the child psychologists cannot show that said mechanism produces an actual, verifiable response that is adverse and mentally toxic, and which cannot be avoided by changing some other parameter, then there's nothing for a law to do.
(You have to have both. Just showing a mechanism isn't enough, if the mechanism can be trivially ignored by most people. Even the response is not enough, if you cannot prove beyond all reasonable doubt what triggers it, OR if there were some other change - better education, for example - that could do the job better and more universally.)
The ONLY valid legislation would be IF the science justified legislation in the first place AND the legislation honored what the science defined as being the REAL problem, AND the legislation honored what the experts said society could reasonably respond to, AND the legislation honored what the Constitution defined as being the place of legislation, no matter what the data might say.
If all those conditions had been respected and met, I seriously doubt anybody would have had
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually, many people think this, but they are mistaken because they're leaving out an important part of the legal system.
Judges need to pay attention not only to the constitution, but also need to carefully consider precendent. This is the part that most people don't realize, and why they get confused when rulings happen that seem contray to how they understand the Constitution or particular laws. The Constitution and the laws of the land are only the beginning of the US legal system, it's the judges that interpret the laws and establish precedents which, later, are followed by other judges in other interpretations and rulings down the road.
This is why Chief Justice Roberts, for example, says he personally doesn't think that abortion should be legal (or some variety on "Roe vs Wade was decided wrong), but considers it to be settled law, and he would need some sort of extraordinary circumstance to occur for him to vote to overturn RvW. It's the principle of "stare decisis", and you can read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stare_decisis
There are, indeed, people who don't believe that stare decisis should be as predominant as it is, but they seem to be in the minority. Stare decisis isn't a new legal concept dreamt up in the last decade or two, though. It's been around a long time.
So the judge doesn't think I have a right to decide what my child has access to?
Actually the judge does think you have a right to decide what your child has access to, the judge doesn't think you have a right to decide what MY child has access to.
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