Game On For SCOTUS

The Supreme Court will take up the decision to overturn California's controversial video game law, a move that could decide a number of questions about video games, free speech, and depicted violence.

On Monday, the justices agreed to review a California law that a federal appeals court struck down last year on the grounds that even children and teenagers enjoy free speech rights that are protected by the First Amendment. The case will be heard late this year or in early 2011.

California is one of a string of states that have enacted similar laws restricting minors' rights to buy violent video games--legislation that has been uniformly rejected by the courts. Laws in Illinois and Michigan were blocked by federal judges on First Amendment grounds in 2005, and earlier laws in Indianapolis and Missouri's St. Louis County were also shot down.

The U.S. Supreme Court has not squarely addressed this topic, but it has said in other cases that even minors have some free-expression rights.

Although California's law doesn't target a specific game by name, government lawyers did single out Postal 2, which allows players to go on murderous rampages, by name. And the Federal Trade Commission has previously targeted the makers of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" for having sexually-explicit content.

The California law slaps anyone who sells or rents a "violent video game" to a minor with a $1,000 fine. That was defined as a game in which the player has the option of "killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being" in offensive ways. Parents or guardians are still permitted to buy those games for minors.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown said on Monday that the state should be able to place "reasonable restrictions on the distribution of extremely violent material to children."

The Entertainment Software Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group that filed many of the lawsuits, on Monday said it thought the justices would agree with the lower courts.

"Courts throughout the country have ruled consistently that content-based regulation of computer and video games is unconstitutional," the ESA said. "Research shows that the public agrees, video games should be provided the same protections as books, movies, and music."

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the video game law in October 2005, but a federal judge blocked (PDF) it from taking effect a few months later. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. 

Are video games free speech?  Do they deserve protections?  What about the rights of minors to purchase these games?  Who decides if games are too violent for children?  There are actually a lot of really big questions out there that could be answered by a Supreme Court decision.  Having said that, a court that upheld the free speech rights of corporations and that campaign commercials were protected free speech, and then just recently determined that people could sell animal cruelty videos as free speech may not hold the same view of video games as such, especially since this case revolves around minors.

We'll see.