Intellectual Property Law

Australia to Filter Online Games

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

One beneficial side effect of Internet filtering is that it points up quirks in how countries make content decisions: what’s blacklisted, and why? The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australia’s proposed Internet censorship system (currently in its second phase of testing) will block access to on-line and downloadable games that aren’t MA-15 or milder. This is due to a sharp break in the rating scale Australia uses to rate games: they’re either MA15+ or below, or they’re Refused Classification. The black list of sites to be filtered on a mandatory basis is, at the moment, restricted to RC material. So, you can have a magazine that’s R18 and buy it if you’re an adult, but you can’t play a game that would earn the equivalent rating.

This might be useful in getting Australia to reform its content classification system, which has some weird dichotomies in evaluating on-line vs. off-line material, and in dealing with different media for the same content. This particular quirk, though, seems like it’s vulnerable to gamesmanship: if I were an Australian gaming company, I’d surely submit complaints about my competitors’ games (especially foreign ones) - censorship could help my sales by eliminating alternatives.

Fun stuff. Hat tip to Boing Boing.

Full post as published by Info/Law on June 25, 2009 (boomark / email).