Supreme Court rules Video Games protected by Constitution

Yesterday, in a 7-2 decision the Supreme Court ruled that video games, even violent ones, are indeed protected under the first amendment of the US Constitution. The ruling came in the case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, and concerned a California law that would have enforced fines on anyone selling violent video games to people under 18. In the decision Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

Head on over to The New York Times for more about the decision and why Scalia said violent speech is different from obscenity.