Supreme Court to hear California game law case

Last February, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's decision that California's law preventing the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. According to the appeals-court ruling, bill AB1179, signed into California law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005, violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.

In May, the California government appealed the court's decision on the law, which was penned by California State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), who was a child psychologist before entering public service. Today, the US Supreme Court--the country's highest legal body--agreed to hear the case, officially titled Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, v. Entertainment Merchants Association. The latter is a lobby for the US home entertainment industry and was formed by the merger of the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association (IEMA) and the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) in 2006.

Though it is unclear exactly when the case will be heard, both sides of the debate wasted no time in sounding off on the court's decision. "I am very pleased that the Supreme Court has accepted our case to help protect children from the harmful effects of excessively violent, interactive video games," said Yee in a statement. "The Supreme Court has never heard a case dealing with violent video games. I am hopeful that the high court will determine our law to be Constitutional, but regardless, states are now certain to receive direction on how to proceed with this important issue."

Equally vocal was Michael Gallagher, president of the Entertainment Software Association, the lobby that represents most major game publishers. "Courts throughout the country have ruled consistently that content-based regulation of computer and video games is unconstitutional," he declared in a statement. "Research shows that the public agrees, video games should be provided the same protections as books, movies, and music."

Both Yee and Gallagher made reference to the court's ruling in the case of the US v. Stevens last week. In an 8 to 1 decision, the court threw out the three-year prison sentence of Robert Stevens, who had been convicted under a law banning videos of animal cruelty. (In this case, the offending material was dog-fighting videos.) The law had been enacted as a response to so-called "crush videos," in which small animals are stomped to death in sadomasochistic sexual rituals.

"As the Court recognized last week in the US v. Stevens case, the First Amendment protects all speech other than just a few 'historic and traditional categories' that are 'well defined and narrowly limited,'" said Gallagher. "We are hopeful that the Court will reject California's invitation to break from these settled principles by treating depictions of violence, especially those in creative works, as unprotected by the First Amendment."

Yee took a more legalistic tack when weighing in on the case. "Last week, the high court struck down a law, in United States v. Stevens, that would have banned the sale of media that depicts animal cruelty, however, the Court said that such a law may be constitutional if it were more narrowly tailored. California's violent video game [law] is narrowly tailored and focuses only on the sale of such ultraviolent video games to children, whereas the Stevens case banned the sale of animal cruelty films to all individuals. In addition, California's law is dealing with an interactive media versus a passive media in the animal cruelty case."