Legal Niches

FindLaw.com's Julie Hilden Predicts Game Law Win

By james_fudge

FindLaw.com's Julie Hilden reads the tea leaves on the Supreme Court's decision to hear arguments on Schwarzenegger vs. Video Software Dealers Association, and comes to a conclusion that many opponents of the bill will not want to hear: the court may very well uphold the law.

In a lengthy blog post dissecting the particulars, Hilden says that "it seems it seems very unlikely that the Supreme Court took this case in order to proclaim, as the Ninth Circuit panel did, that minors do indeed have First Amendment rights – rights that extend far enough to reach "violent" video games."

The biggest concern is that the court may create a First Amendment exception when it comes to video games. While the court did not do this in its recent decision to strike down the federal anti-animal-cruelty depiction statute, it did not say that it would never do so in other circumstances.

Another important point is the court's allowance of a watered-down "obscene as to minors" test when sexually-explicit material is the subject, and, as Hilden points out, the "violent" video game law clearly borrows from that test. Read More

read more

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on May 10, 2010 (boomark / email).