Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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), [...]
Some lawmakers at the federal, state and local level have advocated video game industry regulation in the name of protecting children from potentially objectionable content, usually of a violent nature. In my opinion, the better approach–and one that doesn’t involve government censorship or regulation of games–is to empower parents to better make these decisions for [...]
Over at National Review Online today, Peter Suderman has a good discussion of the current state of video game politics. As usual, a lot of politicians are playing games; political games, that is. Suderman notes that: …attacking the video-game industry has long been a favored sport amongst politicians eager to shore up their credibility with [...]
It is too early to say for sure but there are some encouraging signs that our public policymakers are finally starting to get the point went it comes to the sensibility (and constitutional futility) of trying to regulate video game content. Just yesterday, for example, lawmakers in the District of Columbia passed legislation that establishes [...]
May 24, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
