Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association
| Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Negotiated November 2, 2010 |
||||
| Decided June 27, 2011 |
||||
|
||||
| facts | ||||
| Certiorari to clarify whether a ban on the sale of violent video games to minors without parental consent violates constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. | ||||
| decision | ||||
| The 1st additional article guarantees the right of video game dealers to sell their products to minors within the scope of freedom of speech and expression. Even extremely violent content does not justify the state's right to restrict the rights of dealers. | ||||
| occupation | ||||
|
||||
| Positions | ||||
|
||||
| Applied Law | ||||
| 1. Amendment to the United States Constitution |
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association is a US Supreme Court hearing on the rights of video game dealers. Negotiated the question of whether the state California the sale of violent performing video games ( " violent video games may restrict or prohibit") to minors without parental consent.
judgment
The court, in its majority opinion, upheld the legality of selling violent video games to minors, even without parental consent. Even in the case of extreme depictions of violence, the constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and expression outweigh possible negative effects on the development and behavior of children. These should also be rated as rather low.
As an example of extremely violent content, a video game was discussed at the hearing in which the player doused a schoolgirl with gasoline and set it on fire. The court also did not rate such content as harmful enough to young people to take a back seat to the first additional article . A sales ban for young people is not constitutional even in such cases.
In order to justify the ban, California had submitted a number of studies to the court - the majority of which came from the psychologist Craig A. Anderson - which were supposed to justify the ban with the fact that the representation and consumption of violence in video and computer games ultimately turned into real acts of violence in real life Would live. The court summarized the content of the submitted studies in such a way that they would not prove that the games provoked aggressive acts among minors. In addition, the studies are based solely on correlation , which is no evidence of causality . Furthermore, most of the studies would suffer from significant methodological flaws.