California's failed attempt at video-game censorship costs the state $2M

Now that California's video-game censorship law has been struck down by the courts, the state finds itself $2 million poorer, having had to pay the legal expenses of all the vendors they sued under it.

A bit over half a decade ago when California legislators felt entitled to protect children across their state by restricting sales of violent video games struck me as deeply amusing from the onset. Not because it would end up costing the state roughly $2 Million in legal fees after a failed appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court nor out of the sheer disregard for the First Amendment. But because the sheer bureaucratic arrogance on the parts of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, the Governor of California and State Attorney during this time in believing it was their responsibility to discern what content children should or shouldn’t have exposure...
Created by California lawmaker Former San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Leland Yee, now a senator, in the hopes of curbing children’s access to games that allow for assassination, violent crimes, rape, etc. – the law would have fined retailers $1000 for each instance of selling a game to a child that depicted any sort of terrifyingly horrible act that could teach children the crimes in games versus reality are exactly on par. Yee also made a provision in the law that violence in a game would be visibly denoted by some sort of label on the packaging, a measure already taken by the game industry’s ESRB.

California's struck down video game law saddles state with $2 Million bill (via /.)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Business • california • censorship • free speech • Games

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danegeld

Good job it got struck out; but $2M is in the financial noise floor for California.
kthugha

encouraging.

there’s something distressing to me in this article, though. does examiner.com not employ a copy editor or proof reader? it’s hard for me to take an article seriously when there are so many mistakes in the language.
- Navin_Johnson
  
  I’ve never considered it a news source. I always thought it was kind of a site where anybody could just write whatever. I usually that keep in mind when stories pop up from there.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I used to think that it was the SF Examiner until I started to notice a lot of bizarre trash being submitted to Submitterator.
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      Ha yeah, I was similarly confused when I first saw pieces turning up from there.
RedShirt77

2Million seems like it isn’t the most relevant number. Isn’t that the payment to the challengers and a pretty small number for a state that size? I would think their defense number might be similar in size and if they tried to implement this the money wasted on setting up those systems would far exceed 2Mill.
RedShirt77

Ah, the AG office number is included.

I am surprised it didn’t play a bigger role in the article that this was Mr violent movie, trying to ban violent video games. Republicans really lack a sense of Irony.
eeePapa

So age restricting violence violates a child’s first amendment rights, but age restricting sexual themes does not?
- Ben Hutchings
  
  As previously explained here, in fact: http://boingboing.net/2011/07/13/tom-the-dancing-bug-57.html