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Jack Thompson's Violent Game Bill Signed Into Law
simoniker writes "Louisiana Democratic Representative Roy Burrell's HB1381 bill, covering violent videogames, has been signed into law by Governor Kathleen Blanco. The law takes effect immediately, the latest in a very long line of video game-related bills specific to one U.S. State. The measure proposed by HB 1381, which was drafted with the help of controversial Florida attorney and anti-game activist Jack Thompson, allows a judge to rule on whether or not a videogame meets established criteria for being inappropriate for minors and be subsequently pulled from store shelves. A person found guilty of selling such a game to a minor would face fines ranging from $100 to $2,000, plus a prison term of up to one year. Needless to say, the ESA will likely be mounting a legal challenge to this bill in the very near future."
"The reason is that this industry, through the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), its developers' lobbyist, the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), and the retailers' lobbyist, IEMA (Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association) are involved in ongoing fraudulent conduct in marketing video games that contain adult material to children."
1:) Prove it
2:) If you can't do you as an attorney know what Libel is?
3:) IIRC Libel can be grounds for revocation of your BAR registration.
The bill's intent is to keep adult-oriented (this criteria to be determined by a judge) games from getting into minor's hands, and fines any store responsible for selling said games to minors. This is not necessarily a bad thing; one of the biggest weaknesses of the ESRB is its lack of real power: it lacks any and all punitive ability. It can assign ratings all it wants, but when it comes down to it, individual store policy determines who can buy any given game. Clearly this has been ineffective in keeping inappropriate games from the hands of minors. We can argue all day long that: "this is the responsibility of the parents, zomg the government is evil, how dare they try to say that killing hookers is bad, zomg," but really the gaming industry lacks any coherent self-regulation and this needs to change.
Unfortunately, this bill is one step in the right direction (fining retailers who sell GTA3 to ten year olds) and three steps in the wrong (absolutely no specification as to what can be considered "inappropriate," granting sole discretion to the judge, and calling for any "inappropriate game" to be pulled from circulation.) The last wrong is the one that concerns me the most: since when does content "not suitable for minors" suddenly translate into "not suitable for sale?" That seems to me a gross overextension of what the bill should be trying to do, which is to keep minors from playing excessively violent or sexual games. It's no secret that idiots like Jack Thompson believe the world would be a better place without video games, period, but it shocks me that any legislature would buy into this. There are plenty of types of media (rape-pornography, for instance) that the courts currently do not have the ability to demand be removed from circulation. I'm supposed to believe that ANY game could be more harmful to society than the simulation of rape? That doesn't make any sense at all.