The Supreme Court of the United States in a 7 to 2 decision - has struck-down California's violent video-games ban, and in doing so has ruled that restricting the sale of violent games to minors by force of law is unconstitutional. This is, without question, the biggest and most important American legal decision in video game history.
The most important part of the decision, in terms of future lawmaking, is in the wording of the Majority Opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia (becoming, for the first time in his entire tenure, "cool") which specifically singles out the two most common arguments for game-censorship - that gaming's interactive nature and the un-planned-for nature technological evolution makes a "special case" for restriction - as being insufficient.
Incidentally, the decision defied the typical "liberal/conservative" split in the Court - a plurality of Justices voted to kill the ban, but Conservative Clarence Thomas and Liberal Steven Breyer were the dissenting votes.
No comments:
Post a Comment