Just FYI, the latest update of my booklet on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now live. The new version, Version 3.1, provides minor updates to all sections of the book and a new appendix of relevant research in the field. I issue major updates early each year and 1 or 2 tweaks during the course of the year to reflect the evolution of the parental control and online child safety market and debate.
For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education efforts, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety. I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation. As I conclude after evaluating that state of the market: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.”
The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, and the previous editions of the report are housed there too in case you want to see how it has evolved over the past two years. For those interested in taking a quick look at the report, I have embedded it down below the fold as a Scribd file. Finally, as is always the case, I encourage readers to send me updates and suggestions for how to improve the report and I will incorporate them into future versions. Continue reading →
GamePolitics.com reports on a murder trial in Alabama in which the attorney for a disturbed teenager is blaming video games for his barbaric behavior:
The lawyer for a man being tried for murder is trying to convince an Alabama jury that the defendant believed he was acting out a video game when he murdered an 80-year-old man on Halloween, 2005.
As reported by the Decatur Daily, Andrew Reid Lackey, 24, does not dispute that he stabbed, shot and gouged out the eye of his victim, Charlie Newman. However, Lackey’s attorney, Randy Gladden, is pointing the finger at video games. From the newspaper report:
Actions that led to a deadly confrontation between a defendant and an 80-year-old widower resembled a video game to the accused… [Attorney] Gladden described Lackey… as a computer geek who had immersed himself in video games and lived in “a different world than you and I.”
Tapes of a 911 call made by the victim during the fatal confrontation, however, indicate that old-school greed may have been the motive. Lackey is heard to demand of the victim, ”Where’s the vault?” seven different times. Charlie Newman’s grandson had previously told Lackey that the victim kept a large sum of money in a vault under the stairs. However, no such vault existed.
It’s just disgraceful–but perhaps not all that surprising–that this desperate defense attorney would employ tactics like this. Video games have become the universal excuse du jour for violent behavior. It’s absurd for all the reasons I have pointed out here before. It’s abundantly clear that old fashion greed and a disturbed mind motivated this particular crime, and if you think that sort of thing didn’t happen before video games came along, then you just haven’t read any history. Of course, they instead just blamed movies, comics, and books for the crimes back then! There’s always someone else or something else to blame. It’s the never-ending search for a universal scapegoat for irrational or criminal behavior. The twisted logic = Don’t blame the individual, blame the media.
Anthony Prestia of Laws of Play, a blog dedicated to covering legal developments in the gaming industry, somehow got some face time with Supreme Court Justice Scalia and was able to ask for his feelings concerning the constitutionality of recent state video game legislation. “In particular,” Prestia says, “I asked him whether as an originalist he believed that state laws banning the sale of mature-rated video games to minors ran afoul of the First Amendment.” Here’s Prestia’s summary and analysis of Scalia’s answer:
In his most succinct reply of the day, Justice Scalia replied that he did believe such legislation was constitutional. He began by explaining his belief that sound constitutional precedent holds that minors may be subjected to prohibitions that adults are not–-he instantly drew the parallel to regulation of pornography sales. However, Justice Scalia emphasized that unprotected speech, such as obscenity–which he was unwilling to define for reasons that are immediately evident to any constitutional scholar–-can be prohibited from sale regardless of the purchaser’s age. I think the important thing to note here is that Justice Scalia did not suggest that violent and/or sexual content in games rises to the level of unprotected speech. In fact, he did not even suggest that video games themselves are not protected by the First Amendment despite his strict originalist beliefs.
That’s an interesting response in that Scalia’s latter comments imply that even older, more conservative judges are coming around to understanding how video games are a form of artistic expression deserving the protection of the First Amendment. But Scalia’s earlier suggestion that state laws banning sales of certain video games to minors maybe constitutional deserves a response.
One of the things I find most interesting about calls to regulate “excessively violent” content on television, in movies, or in video games is the way critics make massive leaps of logic and draw outrageous conclusions based on myopic, anecdotal reasoning. I was reminded of that again today when reading through an interview with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va), one of the most vociferous critics of all sorts of media content and a long-time proponent of regulation to censor such violent content in particular (however it is defined). (I have written about his past regulatory proposals here and here).
PFF has just released my latest paper entitled “Parental Control Perfection? The Impact of the DVR and VOD Boom on the Debate over TV Content Regulation.” In the report, I focus on the extent to which new video technologies, such as digital video recorders (DVRs) and video on demand (VOD) services, are changing the way households consume media and are helping parents better tailor viewing experiences to their tastes and values. I provide evidence showing the rapid spread of these technologies and discuss how parents are using these tools in their homes. Finally, I argue that these developments will have profound implications for debates over the regulation of video programming. As parents are given the ability to more effectively manage their family’s viewing habits and experiences, it will lessen—if not completely undercut—the need for government intervention on their behalf.
A few weeks ago, I outlined the amazing keynote address that Harvard University law professor Laurence H. Tribe delivered at PFF’s annual Aspen Summit. Now you can read it for yourself. PFF has just published the transcript of his speech, which was entitled, “Freedom of Speech and Press in the 21st Century: New Technology Meets Old Constitutionalism.”
Professor Tribe provides a 14-part indictment of new government proposals to regulate “excessively violent” content. But he also speaks more broadly about the importance of defending the First Amendment from attacks on many different platforms, and for many different types of content. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the concluding section of his remarks:
The broad lesson of this discussion of television violence is the centrality of the First Amendment’s opposition to having government as big brother regulate who may provide what information content to whom, whether or not for a price. The large problem that this exposes is that especially in a post-9/11 world, where grownups understandably fear for themselves and for their children and worry about the brave new world of online cyber reality that their kids can navigate more fluently than they can, it is enormously tempting to forget or to subordinate the vital principles of constitutional liberty. Even if, after years of litigation and expenditure, the First Amendment prevails, it can be worn down dramatically by having to wage that fight over and over and over.
Amen to that. And that, in a nutshell, describes what much of my research agenda at PFF has been focused on. It is a pleasure to add Prof. Tribe’s address to our growing body of research on the sanctity of freedom of speech and centrality of the First Amendment to our democratic republic as we continue “to wage that fight over and over and over.”
The Parents Television Council has a new report out this week about the supposed decline of the TV “Family Hour.” The City Journal has just posted my response to that PTC report here. It begins as follows…
__________________
Who Killed TV’s “Family Hour”? It’s not who you think.
by Adam D. Thierer
7 September 2007
The nonprofit Parents Television Council (PTC) released a report this week lamenting the supposed death of broadcast television’s “family hour.” Though neither the Federal Communications Commission nor Congress ever mandated it, 8 to 9 PM Monday through Saturday (Eastern time), and 7 to 9 PM on Sunday, have traditionally been devoted to family-friendly programming. But the PTC’s new report claims that these blocks of time are now “no place for children,” because “corporate interests have hijacked the family hour” and “have pushed more and more adult-oriented programming to the early hours of the evening.”
One might respond to this claim by questioning the PTC’s methodology, particularly its definitions of foul language. Simon Vozick-Levinson of Entertainment Weekly’s “PopWatch Blog” takes this approach, accusing the PTC of “cooking the numbers” to suit its cultural agenda. But I don’t want to engage in methodological nit-picking, since it quickly devolves into a subjective squabble about acceptable language and appropriate programming. Instead, I want to point out the fundamental flaw in the report’s premise. The family hour may well be dead—but parents, not broadcasters, were the ones who killed it.
I’ve written much about the potential “chilling effect” associated with over-zealous FCC regulation of speech. Some people doubt that the FCC’s regulatory wrath is really so severe that media operators will censor important programs for fear of being fined afterward. But we know that that is exactly what happened with a 9/11 documentary last year when CBS decided to censor the remarks of firefighters under duress. Imagine that, firefighters were swearing as the disaster unfolded! But apparently we need to have history whitewashed for our benefit. Absurd.
The video game industry’s string of unbroken First Amendment court victories continued this week with a win in the case of Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger. [Decision here.] In this case, the VSDA and the Entertainment Software Association brought a suit seeking a permanent injunction against a California law passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), which would have blocked the sale of violent video games to those under 18. Offending retailers could have been fined for failure to comply with the law.
The court’s decision overturning the law was written by Judge Ronald Whyte and it echoed what every previous decision on this front has held, namely:
This 52-page article appears in the latest volume of the Catholic University Law School’s CommLaw Conspectus. The article can be found online here.
In this essay, I make the case that the radically unfair system of modern broadcast industry regulation must be completely abolished. “If America is to have a consistent First Amendment in the Information Age,” I argue, “efforts to extend the broadcast regulatory regime must be halted and that regime must be relegated to the ash heap of history.” I go on to make the case against all the traditional broadcast industry regulatory rationales and conclude that: “the traditional rationales for asymmetrical regulation of broadcasting — scarcity, pervasiveness, and the public interest — either no longer make sense or are increasingly impractical to enforce in an age of technological convergence and media abundance. Instead of resisting the inexorable movement toward media parity and a consistent First Amendment standard for the Information Age, policymakers should embrace these changes and focus on responding to the problem of objectionable content through education and empowerment-based strategies that enable families to craft their own household media standards.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
Comments 
Posted in: First Amendment, Free Speech & Online Child Safety 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
