Legal Niches

Media Coalition Slams California Appeal of Violent Video Game Law

By gamepolitics

The Media Coalition, a free speech defense trade group has criticized California's Supreme Court appeal of a lower court decision striking down its violent video game law as unconstitutional.

Media Coalition Executive Director David Horowitz said in a statement:

We are very disappointed that the California Governor and Attorney General have decided to spend the state's scarce resources to ask the Supreme Court to carve out a new exception to the First Amendment.

 

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier declined the state's invitation to create a new class of speech outside of the First Amendment. This is settled law. In recent years, in addition to California, similar laws in Indianapolis, Michigan, Illinois, St. Louis County, Minnesota, and Washington attempted to ban video games with certain violent content were uniformly found unconstitutional.

Media Coalition members include video game industry trade groups the Entertainment Software Association (game publishers) and Entertainment Merchants Association* (game retailers). It was these two entities which originally brought suit against the California law in 2005.

The Entertainment Consumers Association is also a Media Coalition member.

* Prior to its 2006 merger with the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association, the Entertainment Merchants Association was known as the Video Software Dealers Association, and the California case continues as VSDA v. Schwarzenegger.

FULL DISCLOSURE DEPT: The ECA is the parent company of GamePolitics.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on May 21, 2009 (boomark / email).