Supreme court rules that video games are protected speech

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/policy/231000496

Thank god for that.

Sometimes, regulation is a good thing. That time it wasn't. Good thing it was repealed.

Yay!

Labeling? Fine.

Other restrictions? Less fine.

Yay

edited 27th Jun '11 2:13:19 PM by storyyeller

Sanity! Hooray!

That's great!

Awesome.

Now somebody needs to tell that to our government.

No, somebody needs to tell people that video games are not only for kids. That would solve a lot of problems.

edited 27th Jun '11 2:35:52 PM by MilosStefanovic

This is actually surprising. That's rare.

OH NO!! Now parents have to put effort into managing their child's intake! What fresh Hell will this world become??

edited 27th Jun '11 2:51:05 PM by Bur

I was playing Indigo Prophecy yesterday and I stumbled upon a funny in-game newspaper article. A politician was basically saying "guns are a right to American citizens so we can't blame them, but video games are surely the cause of all this violence!"

Gun control debates aside, I think this pseudo-article really spoke to me about how people view video games. You can blame anything causes violence...in fact, the killer in Indigo Prophecy was reading Shakespeare right before he murdered someone. Does this mean Shakespeare is dangerous for children? Of course not.

My theory is that violent-prone children are attracted to more violent video games in the first place. The video game itself does not spur this violence. I do recognize that children may want to emulate what they see in video games, though.

edited 27th Jun '11 3:06:36 PM by snailbait

Shakespeare is dangerous for everyone.

I wasn't very surprised to be honest, scalia was ripping the defendant (is that how the supreme court works?) to pieces.

JUSTICE SCALIA: What's a deviant — a deviant, violent video game? As opposed to what? A normal violent video game?

MR. MORAZZINI: Yes, Your Honor. Deviant would be departing from established norms.

JUSTICE SCALIA: There are established norms of violence?

MR. MORAZZINI: Well, I think if we look back -

JUSTICE SCALIA: Some of the Grimm's fairy tales are quite grim, to tell you the truth.

MR. MORAZZINI: Agreed, Your Honor. But the level of violence -

JUSTICE SCALIA: Are they okay? Are you going to ban them, too?

MR. MORAZZINI: Not at all, Your Honor.

Scalia be trollin'

Someone shoop the trollface onto a judges robes.

Problem, Defence?

Oh, indeed. Romeo and Juliet are awful role models. We should just ban everything remotely controversial or violent.

^ Then we should ban The Iliad while we're at this crazy scheme of overprotectance. Come on, Agamemnon kills his own (child!) daughter JUST SO HE CAN HAVE FAVORABLE WINDS TO GO TO WAR WITH TROY.

And ban The Odyssey too, near the end a father and his son go on a homicidal rampage.

Romeo and Juliet were meant to be an example of mad, irrational love (Anti Role Models, to be exact), but that interpretation is unfortunately forgotten by most people with no knowledge of the History of Literature and Literary Theory. Ideal love, my ass.

Not to mention people who have no idea how love is supposed to look.

Yeah, somehow everyone's forgotten that Romeo and Juliet were both basically batshit, and if they'd been one iota less stupid it would've had a happy ending. Where did the current interpretation come from and how did it get to be so damn popular?

On topic- I just came on the board to make this very topic after having read this earlier today. I think the most heartwarming piece of it was the 7-2 ruling- that's practically a slam dunk in supreme court terms. Apparently, it was kind of an unusual hearing, much more interesting than your average supreme court case. The justices brought up rap lyrics and poked fun at Scalia's constitutionalism.

edited 27th Jun '11 4:57:42 PM by deathjavu

Even better: if you read the details of the dissents, it was really an 8-1 majority for the proposition "video games are protected speech".

So who was the actual traitor? Sotomayor?

Breyer was the only one that said video games aren't protected.

Yes. It's like injecting acid into their forming brains and prevents them from becoming smarter.

Well done, Supreme Court! If they judge otherwise, the whole industry would have been affected, and, with that Europe too would have suffered.