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Appeals Court Strikes Down California's Violent Game Ban
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has struck down as unconstitutional a California statute purporting to ban the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. In a 30-page decision (PDF), in Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger, the federal appeals court ruled that 'the Act, as a presumptively invalid content based restriction on speech, is subject to strict scrutiny and not the 'variable obscenity' standard from Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968). Applying strict scrutiny, we hold that the Act violates rights protected by the First Amendment because the State has not demonstrated a compelling interest, has not tailored the restriction to its alleged compelling interest, and there exist less-restrictive means that would further the State's expressed interests. Additionally, we hold that the Act's labeling requirement is unconstitutionally compelled speech under the First Amendment because it does not require the disclosure of purely factual information; but compels the carrying of the State's controversial opinion.'"
Tempting fate by going against one of the most violent; a Terminator.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
i veel check urls before posting
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Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The ninth also leads in the number of cases that don't wind up being reversed. Not that either statistic tells us anything meaningful about the likelihood of this particular ruling being reversed.
So this doesn't apply to piracy, right? Then the kids won't be affected anyway.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
While many here will certainly applaud this decision, I find the double-standard amazing. If we can ban sales of pictures of people having sex to minors and impose other draconian punishment, then why is obscene violence any different?
I somehow doubt the founding fathers would have equated free speech to depictions of extreme violence, though I'll undoubtedly get modded down for this.
There's certainly a case for forbidding censorship of any kind, but mixing up the values brings up crap like this.
I certainly am not happy about my freedom to criticize politicians being considered on the same level as some spotty fifteen year old kid's "right" to buy GTA.
This was a really good ruling. Leave censorship to the parents. There has been yet to prove a direct corollation between violent behvior and video games. Some studies have shown that operrant conditioning is happening where video game players may overcome the natural inhibition to kill. However, this theory fails to explain why most people that play violent video games do not go out and act like that in the real world. Behavioral science, while fascinating, is inexact at best. Legislating people's actions based on an inexact science is never a very good idea.
The ESRB warnings do not hold the weight of law, they are a private company. I can make a game and it doesn't HAVE to be rated.
Yeah, and video game laws lead in the number that wind up being reversed, too. I can only imagine how frustrated lawmakers must be that free speech applies to things they dislike, too.
Thankfully, the judges can tell the difference between good science and bullshit science. Too bad the fucking family values voters, who vote more often than people who don't have agendas to push and get politicians who pander to their votes, can't.
Fixed that for you. The politicians don't care one way or the other. If those voters got it in their heads that painting the washington monument pink would prevent violence, then we'd have serious proposals to start buying pink paint and lots of rollers.
I don't think the GP was arguing that the lifting of the ban is bad, it's just a curious double standard. I've never understood the US (and increasingly UK) regulators' belief that violence is good and sex is bad. I have far more sympathy for the continental European tendency to view sex as good and violence as bad (even if -- or perhaps because -- it does lead to the French tendency when confronted with a war to say "f*** it...").
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Even better, just look at the FCC.
Saying "Fuck" is most definitely speech; why can the FCC ban that on public radio waves?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I won't get into the should kids or shouldn't kids buy various games issue. I don't think that's the real question these articles raise. The real issue is why would any politician vote for a law such as this which has already been shown time and again to be an automatic failure then waste money defending the failed law. As far as why judges strike these down, that's an interesting question so I asked a client of mine that happens to also be a judge once.
The main issue for the courts, it seems, is that it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to tailor legislation to violence alone in the same manner as it is with pornography. This difficulty of is the real issue from what I can gather. We can say any evidence of bloodshed is obscene but then what about a safety video showing actual injury? By definition, these things are both bloody and violent yet are absolutely something minors should see before they operate certain power tools.
What it boils down to is what is considered obscene, really. Pretty much everyone (I suppose there are some few who'd disagree, thus the qualifier) agrees that nudity can be obscene, although not always. We likewise can agree that certain subject matter such as sexually explicit material are inappropriate for people under a certain age. Not everyone, however, agrees that violence, in and of itself, is necessarily obscene.
I hope this makes sense; I'm neither a lawyer nor a legal expert so I may habve mangled this somewhat.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
Exactly. We can have games in which we run around sawing people's heads off, disemboweling them, torturing them, gunning them down by the thousands - but at least we won't see their nipples!
I think when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they never meant it to mean that a black guy could be president.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I don't know, but I know that he won't be saying it in court!
That is an absolutely salient observation for any time somebody parrots the line about the founding fathers. Those guys, well, they're dead. WE are the country now.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Publicly owned airwaves are exactly the place where you should be able to express yourself. Not much of a free speech if the only place you can exercise it is in your own bathroom
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I don't think the GP was arguing that the lifting of the ban is bad, it's just a curious double standard. I've never understood the US (and increasingly UK) regulators' belief that violence is good and sex is bad.
In my view the bans on 'obscenity' are equally idiotic, just political pandering.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
What it boils down to is what is considered obscene...
What I want to know is where does one group of people get the right to legislate for the rest of us what is 'obscene'.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Why can't it be both? There is more good music today and it's more accessible to more people than ever before in history. It might be hard to find though since it's buried under a Mt Everest of crap.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Did anyone notice that the lawyers who successfully argued for "freedom of speech" here are the same ones who are fighting so hard to prevent the televising of the SONY v. Tenenbaum RIAA case?
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
We likewise can agree that certain subject matter such as sexually explicit material are inappropriate for people under a certain age.
Speak for yourself. There's no factual evidence that viewing sexually explicit material is harmful to anyone under any particular age. Calling it "inappropriate" is a matter of opinion, no different from calling political or religious material "inappropriate".
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The violent move industry is losing market share to the violent video game industry. The video game industry is not paying their hired scum politicians enough apparently.
There's a worse double standard here though that was struck down. Video games vs. Every other form of media. In the extreme case, what if they had tried to pass a similar law for books? Not even movies are subject to this though, there is no legal requirement for movies to be rated, or for theaters to bar children from movies. All rating and enforcement is done voluntarily by the theaters.
The double standard we have for sex and violence is a deep rooted societal issue that can't be undone with a few court rulings, but rulings like the one in the TFA can sure as hell beat back the tide of idiot legislators that try to pass this brain-dead anti-video game laws.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
That's all fine and good, but profanity is words, like any other word. If I say shit, I'm in trouble. if I say poop, it's okay. Why? Why make one word worse than another of the same meaning? Somehow, saying God dangit instead of God Dammit is better. Won't you be going to hell for both anyway?
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
That may be true, but there is a branch of government whose sole purpose for existing is to interpret the Founding Fathers' intention in the words of the Constitution. That's pretty much what the Supreme Court does all day.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
Yes, it is a double standard. We should scrutinize laws banning all forms of speech, not just video games.
While many here will certainly applaud this decision, I find the double-standard amazing. If we can ban sales of pictures of people having sex to minors and impose other draconian punishment, then why is obscene violence any different?
I completely agree, and I hate the double standard myself. Personally, I do applaud this decision, and I'd similarly applaud a decision banning sales of pictures of people having sex to minors.
I somehow doubt the founding fathers would have equated free speech to depictions of extreme violence
That might be true, but it's quite irrelevant. If you think it's right that they would be able to decide what equates to free speech and what does not, what you're actually doing is advocating a state-vetted list of things you can and cannot say. That's exactly the opposite of free speech. What makes them right?
I certainly am not happy about my freedom to criticize politicians being considered on the same level as some spotty fifteen year old kid's "right" to buy GTA.
Don't think of it in those terms. It's not that they have a right to buy GTA. It's that the government doesn't have a right to stop them. That's the job of the parents of this spotty fifteen year old kid. Parents these days think that educating their kid means sending them to school and plopping them in front of the tv. Monitoring your kids, especially during the teenage years is tough, but that doesn't mean the government should do your job for you.
Ugh...I should read my previews.
I meant to say I'd applaud a decision against the banning of pornography sales to kids. Again, if the parents care, they should be the ones to monitor their kids.
Sorry for the confusion
I am contractually obligated to mod up anything you say. Fortunately, that contract doesn't keep me from posting after I mod you up.
And you both could not be more wrong. While many states at the time of the American Revolution relied on slavery for their economy, many of the founding fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson) sought to abolish it. They were certainly aware that blacks could be the intellectual and educational equals of whites, because they met some such people in business and from African nations.
Some of the founding fathers would be delighted at how far Mr. Obama has come, and see it as a vindication of their dreams of liberty and justice for all.
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The real issue is why would any politician vote for a law such as this which has already been shown time and again to be an automatic failure then waste money defending the failed law.
Because that way, the politician can say he "did something" about the issue. When stupid angry parents write letters to the legislator, he can assure them he's working hard to protect their poor little children.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Speak for yourself. There's no factual evidence that viewing sexually explicit material is harmful to anyone under any particular age. Calling it "inappropriate" is a matter of opinion, no different from calling political or religious material "inappropriate".
Allowing anyone to view sexually explicit material anytime they wish is quite harmful to the various Catholic denominations, as it undermines their "god-given" authority. They have a vested interest in preventing it, since the bible says so. If they allow it to go unchallenged then they are hypocrites. For that reason, there is a strong religious need to prevent others from doing the things they themselves are prohibited from doing in order to justify their own faith.
People don't have an inability to govern themselves, they have a fundamental inability to refrain from governing others.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Your response to his post doesn't really make any sense, other than to ignore his argument. What does you having served in the military or voting have to do with the Supreme Court?
I love how people who are pushing family values have an agenda to push, while other people "don't have an agenda." Dude, everyone has an agenda. You are naive if you believe otherwise. There are people who want god as a fixture in every aspect of public life. They have an agenda. There are people who feel that god should never be mentioned in any context in public life. They have an agenda. There are people who don't care. Even THEY have an agenda. Hell, there are people who think we should worship their poodles. Everyone has an agenda, it's the people who's agenda you agree with who you blindly don't see as having an agenda. And he's right, the politicians, in the end, really don't give a rats ass about any of these agendas, by and large. Yeah, some might, but most follow their own separate agenda.
"Sex is bad" would help to reduce the population. "Violence is good" would also help to reduce the population. It's obvious. Politicians are tired of all the whining, sniveling voters who demand so much of their time and energy. So, get those voters to stop having babies, and start killing each other off. It's a win-win situation - for game makers and politicians, anyway. ;)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's amusing how naive and anachronistic people can be about the thoughts and feelings of people over 200 years ago, especially given that the issues of race and slavery have been so conflated by modern interpretations of history.
Slavery had virtually nothing to do with race in antiquity, Aristotle considered it to be nothing more than the bottom tier of a meritocracy. The Bible spoke of slavery as a social position to be endured rather than reformed (an attitude that the South latched onto with both hands of course) with no mention of race. The Romans were probably the slavin'-est bitches around, having no qualms about putting every ethnicity they could find under the yoke, including their own. Funny how all the honkies the Romans enslaved didn't whine about being victims for centuries. Instead, when the Roman empire showed weakness they kicked the shit out of it and moved on with their lives. (Albeit into the darkest period of recorded history, but that's neither here nor there.)
All of this is important because the founding fathers were obsessed with antiquity, both directly and through the rehashing of other thinkers from the Renaissance and Enlightenment (if anybody is interested the topic is well covered in Morton White's Philosophy of the American Revolution). Anyway, point is slavery has a history before racism and is not inherently racist. Racism itself is a completely modern abstraction. Every culture on earth has some history of ethnocentrism, only through comparison and synthesis can values be assigned to decide which culture might actually deserve to feel superior. But from the inside of a culture looking out, another culture is almost invariably 'the barbarians and/or heathens'. Only in the West is there enough white guilt to have significantly mitigated that impulse. It sure as hell is alive and well in Asia. I would wager it's harder for a non-Korean to marry into a Korean family than it is for a black person to marry into a white family in the US. (Speaking from experience on the latter.)
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Yes, but equal rights for women did not seem to be important to the founding fathers either. I would like to be wrong, but do you have citations that point otherwise?
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
It's kind of interesting to note that some of the most violent games targeted at young people -- 99% of them male -- are military-style games that this "violence=ok, sex=bad" government apparently has no problem with. There are people out there who think that military action games help to mentally prepare young people for actual military action in years to come. After all, they'd be less likely to panic in such situations, since they'd have some idea about what they need to do to protect themselves. These people must all be paranoid, of course.
You pot-smoking hippy, you. Seriously. If you dare utter an anti-war sentiment in the US these days, you're going to be called a pot-smoking hippy by somebody. I'm not sure when or how, but that has become a bad thing nowadays.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Ah! I've been shot! Where's the QuickLoad key for real life?
The seriousness of the above post is not guaranteed.
Yes, but they couldn't even agree on whether the supreme court should be doing that. Look at Marbury vs. Madison.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
That may be true, but there is a branch of government whose sole purpose for existing is to interpret the Founding Fathers' intention in the words of the Constitution.
That's what some judges do, depending on their judicial philosophy, but it's by no means clear that the purpose of SCOTUS is to interpret the Founding Father's intentions.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I've never understood the US (and increasingly UK) regulators' belief that violence is good and sex is bad.
My guess would be the fact that we have a centuries-long history of being Puritanical conquerors.
"I'd rather have my son watch a video of two people making love than two people trying to kill one another..."
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Oh wow, this one's going to be fun. First off, learn to read, when I was talking about inter-racial relationships I said I had experience with the latter, not the former. To enumerate it specifically, I'm white and married a black woman and we have a daughter. I'm sure they can both tell you what a dyed in the wool bigot I must be.
So, what does slavery have to do with race/ethnocentrism or anything else? Ask the poster(s) I was responding to. Both Antique Geekmeister and Toonol make implicit links between race and slavery. I came along to break those links.
I will come right out and say that contemporary black people need to stop rolling out slavery as some kind of trump card to get pity. Those ancestors who were slaves are long dead, just as my ancestors who were slaves to Rome are dead and I don't get to go to Italy and talk about how The Man messed up everything for me because of what happened to my great*n-grandfather. This neither denies the real suffering of those slaves in the past nor ignores the racism that exists in the present, but there is no (contemporary) link. And I have no qualms with the slave uprisings that did occur (they can't occur now because there are no longer any slaves), both in the antebellum South as well as antiquity such as the Third Servile War and the long struggle between the Spartans and the Helots.
While I'm not going to go hunting for a citation, I'm pretty sure that somebody was whining back in the 19th century, and as for now, I'm sure that a quick search for 'slavery reparations' would answer your question of who. Rome has nothing to do with my initial assertion about American attitudes toward history, nor did I draw direct links for that. What I was saying is that previous posters are trying to stick modern thought processes and morals into the heads of Enlightenment politicians. That's anachronism, and the attitude that spawned it is naivete.
I'm not trying to address whether the founding fathers were racist or not. Not only is the truth of that a matter internal to each person, but when you're talking about cultures over time there are certain parameters that might be considered mitigating. Sort of like grading on a curve, if somebody was significantly less racist in what was a very racist society, they might for practical reasons be considered not racist at all (like getting an A+ for being at the top of the curve even if you have some wrong answers). In an absolute sense, probably virtually all the white people in the colonies were racists, but the ones who were least in spite of that social environment could functionally be considered 'not racist' for the work that they did as abolitionists etc.
White guilt has made Americans less ethnocentric. A lot of people disagree, but ask my wife what it's like as a black person traveling around outside of the US or Africa. Getting catcalls of 'Oy negra!' in Spanish-speaking countries. Asian cultures are polite but militantly xenophobic and insular. Europe thinks they're over it, but tell that to all the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. At least we stopped doing that after Manifest Destiny. And as for hating 'brown people and their religion' at least it's mutual, and they hated us and our religion first.
None of this has anything to do with video game violence, but you can take that up with the posts several levels above.
What I was trying to suggest was simply that slavery was not inherently racist, which means that somebody could be an abolitionist and still a racist (I'm sure that many abolitionists of the antebellum era wouldn't back inter-racial marriage) as well as pro-slavery and not racist (sourced in the classical roots of meritocratic or socially structured race-neutral slavery). Do you see yet? What this means in the context of the original reply is that assuming that because somebody wanted to abolish slavery it doesn't necessarily follow that they wouldn't have wanted all race barriers broken, and THAT was naive and anachronistic.
I have not
Aw motherfuck I must have clicked the anonymous box accidentally. No karma for me. Anyway post is here for those who have thresholds set at 2 and wouldn't see it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit