(CN) - California cannot bar businesses from selling or renting violent video games to minors and imposing age-based labeling requirements, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, affirming a 9th Circuit decision to strike down the law.
In October 2005, then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill barring the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, in the hopes of curbing psychological harm to youth and reducing their aggressive behavior.
The law characterizes a "violent" game as one "in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being." A violent game "enables the player to virtually inflict serious injury upon images of human beings or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner which is especially heinous, cruel or depraved in that it involves torture or serious physical abuse to the victim," according to the act.
Retailers face a $1,000 fine for violating the law, which requires violent video games to "be labeled with a solid white '18' outlined in black" that must appear on the front packaging and be "no less than 2 inches by 2 inches."
Before the law went into effect, the Video Game Software Dealers Association and the Entertainment Merchants Association sued various state officials, claiming the act would unconstitutionally stifle their speech.
U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte sided with the plaintiffs and enjoined the state from enforcing the law and a three-judge appellate panel dismissed the state's appeal, finding that California had failed to consider less-restrictive alternatives or show how the restrictions protect children.
In tossing the appeal, the 9th Circuit explained that the act could not fall under "variable obscenity" standard from the Supreme Court's 1968 decision Ginsberg v. New York. That ruling upheld a New York ban on the sale of "girlie magazines" to minors, even though the material was not considered obscene for adults.
On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed, 7-2, that there is a distinction between the New York and California laws. The decision matches the justices' reaction to the appeal at oral arguments.
"Because speech about violence is not obscene, it is of no consequence that California's statute mimics the New York statute regulating obscenity-for-minors that we upheld in Ginsberg v. New York," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. "That case approved a prohibition on the sale to minors of sexual material that would be obscene from the perspective of a child. ... And because 'obscenity is not protected expression,' the New York statute could be sustained so long as the legislature's judgment that the proscribed materials were harmful to children 'was not irrational.'