Law: Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children

Ugh ...

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down on First Amendment grounds a California law that barred the sale of violent video games to children.

The California law would have imposed $1,000 fines on stores that sold violent video games to people under 18. It defined violent games as those in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being in a way that was patently offensive, appeals to minors' deviant or morbid interests and lacked serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Those definitions tracked language from court decisions upholding laws regulating sexual content. In 1968, in Ginsberg v. New York, the court allowed limits on the distribution to minors of sexual materials like what it called girlie magazines that fell well short of obscenity, which is unprotected by the First Amendment.

For more, see Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children by Adam Liptak, June 27, 2011 at NYTimes.com.