The Media Coalition, a trade association that defends media First Amendment rights, hailed the U.S. Supreme Court after it delivered a 7-2 ruling Monday striking down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors.
David Horowitz, executive director of Media Coalition, which had a filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, said the court made it clear that “violent images and themes in video games are entitled to the same full First Amendment protection as those found in books, movies, comic books, music and every other form of expression.” The Media Coalition brief was signed by American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; Association of American Publishers, Inc.; Freedom to Read Foundation; National Association of Recording Merchandisers; and Recording Industry Association of America.
At issue in the case of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, was a legal challenge to a 2005 California law that prohibited the sale or rental to minors of any video game with violent content. The law-- blocked by a lower court ruling--also required manufacturers to include an age-appropriate warning on the label and violators risked a fine of $1000.
Citing examples of violence in classic children’s literature like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Lord of the Flies, Justice Antonin Scalia said a state's right to protect minors “does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.” Scalia noted that “this country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence,” citing a longrunning history of attempts to restrict violence in movies and comic books. The court also rejected the social science research offered to prove that violent videogames are harming minors, emphasizing that the studies presented, “have been rejected by every court to consider them,” because, “they do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning).”
Horowitz said, “The future will doubtless bring us new mediums of communications and entertainment that we cannot yet imagine, but with today’s ruling, we can at least be confident that they will receive First Amendment protection.”
