As part of its excellent “Room for Debate” series, the New York Times has an interesting new online symposium up now asking, “Will Networks Go Wild, With No Decency Rules?” It was in response to last week’s Second Circuit decision, which again slapped down an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to defend the agency’s indecency enforcement regime. I was honored to be asked to contribute a short essay on the subject. Here are the other contributors and their essays. Take the time to check them out:
I was particularly interested in former FCC’s Chairman Michael Powell’s admission that “The [FCC’s] fleeting expletive policy was a mistake,” and that “the real problem is the now-flawed constitutional foundation on which the law is built.” Powell goes on to argue that, “We cannot have one First Amendment for broadcasting and another one for every other medium. This vestige of a bygone era provides fertile ground for mischief — culture wars, political agenda and moral mandates. It’s high time for the high court to bring our laws into the 21st century.”
I wholeheartedly agree, and I wrote a lengthy law review article on just that topic back in 2007 entitled,“
Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age.” If you find it too boring, just watch this video I made summarizing the key points, which I called “America’s First Amendment Twilight Zone.”
I’ve been meaning to say something about this new paper by Renee Newman Knake of Michigan State University College of Law, which calls for a new paradigm to analyze, and then likely regulate, video game content. Knake’s paper is entitled, “From Research Conclusions to Real Change: Understanding the First Amendment’s (Non)Response to Negative Effects of Mass Media on Children by Looking to the Example of Violent Video Game Regulations.” In it, she proposes to extend an emerging legal philosophy known as “ecogenerism” to the field of video games and the First Amendment treatment thereof. “Ecogenerism” is largely the creation of Barbara Bennett Woodhouse and the theory argues that we should apply lessons or legal frameworks from the field of environmental law to the area of media and children. “Under an ecogenerist model,” states Knake, “media harm decisions should prioritize concern about the level of ‘toxic’ media which children are exposed over free speech interests.” Simply stated, we should treat “toxic media” like toxic chemicals.
There have been other efforts to get courts to relax the legal scrutiny applied to video game content from “strict” to something more relaxed or intermediate in character. For example, there is the “violence as obscenity” approach proposed by Kevin Saunders, who, like Knake, is also with the Michigan State University College of Law. But whereas Saunders has proposed applying an adjacent legal theory or framework (obscenity law) to legal analysis of the constitutionality of regulation of video game content, Woodhouse and now Knake propose a much broader, and more radical, reformulation of First Amendment law along the lines of entirely different body of jurisprudence — again, environment law and regulation.
Of course, this is nuts. The notion that words or images are as “toxic” as chemicals is preposterous, and yet that is exactly what Knake and Woodhouse want us to accept. We can determine with a great deal of certainly the physiological impact of too much mercury or lead on the development of the human brain or body. Generally speaking, we know what dose would kill or deform. The same cannot possibly be said of media, and the very allusion to toxic materials or chemicals is ludicrous to begin with since words and images have never directly killed anyone. EVER! Continue reading →
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.
Continue reading →
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