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The U.S. Supreme Court has over-ruled a California law that restricted the sale of violent video games to children, easing the fears of some in the amusements industry who had worried that if the law were upheld the same restrictions could also be applied to other forms of entertainment such as arcade games.
“Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on governmental action apply,” Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion, which said that video games are covered by the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“Speech...cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them,” the opinion said.
It also dismissed research purporting to show that violent games would cause violent acts: “They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children’s feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a non-violent game.”
The California law imposed fines of $1000 on anyone selling a game that involved “killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” to a minor.
And lawyers for the state tried unsuccessfully to convince the Supreme Court that violence in video games could constitute obscenity, which individual states are allowed to control.
Similar state laws in Illinois and Michigan were struck down by federal judges in 2005, again on First Amendment grounds.
