Legal News

Ninth Circuit Kills Governator?s Violent Video Game Bill

By Dan Slater

Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signs AB 1179 into law, Oct. 7, 2005. The bill restricts the sale and rental of violent video games to minors. (AP)

The video game industry has a voluntary rating system that, among other things, assigns each game one of roughly thirty content descriptors, including “Animated Blood,” “Blood and Gore,” “Cartoon Violence,” “Fantasy Violence,” “Intense Violence” and “Sexual Violence.”

In 2005, California sought to further regulate violent video games. The Governator signed into law an act which mandated an additional labeling requirement and made it illegal to sell or rent a video game that has been labeled “violent” for purposes of the act. Today, the Ninth Circuit struck it down. Here’s a report from the San Fran Chron.

In defending the law, the state argued that violent content should be judged by the same obscenity standards as sex. (For the text of the act, which contains language that tracks the Miller test, see page 5 of the opinion.) Just as the government can prohibit the sale of explicit pornography to minors, state lawyers contended, it should be allowed to establish an adults-only category of ultra-violent video games.

But a unanimous appellate court ruled that Ginsburg v. New York — a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed tighter restrictions on selling explicit materials to minors than to adults — applies only to sexual content and not to violence. “The Supreme Court has carefully limited obscenity to sexual content,” wrote Judge Consuelo Callahan. “We decline the state’s invitation to apply the (same) rationale to materials depicting violence.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).