On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 7-to-2 majority opinion against a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to children in the case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. The majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, says that video games “qualify for First Amendment protection. Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium.” The First Amendment essentially provides those protected by the U.S. Constitution with the right to freedom of expression, and in this instance, video games are a way to communicate ideas.

The California law would have prohibited the sale or rental of violent video games to minors under the age of 18, with violent video games defined as “killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.” Retailers who violated the act would have been fined up to $1,000 per infraction. The video game law was originally signed by then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in October of 2005 but was blocked by a federal judge, whose decision was upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The state of California appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn those decisions in May of 2009.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer dissented from the Supreme Court’s ruling. Thomas said that the view at the time when the Bill of Rights was originally amended “does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians,” and Breyer wrote, “California’s law imposes no more than a modest restriction on expression. The statute prevents no one from playing a video game, it prevents no adult from buying a video game, and it prevents no child or adolescent from obtaining a game provided a parent is willing to help.”

The Supreme Court ruling, however, is a huge win for the video game industry which makes $10.5 billion in domestic annual sales. The computer and video game industry are represented by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) in the United States, with members including Disney Interactive Studios, Electronic Arts, Microsoft Corp, and Sony Computer Entertainment America. Michael D. Gallagher, the president and CEO of the ESA stated, “Today, the Supreme Court affirmed what we have always known–that free speech protections apply every bit as much to video games as they do to other forms of creative expression like books, movies and music… The Court declared forcefully that content-based restrictions on games are unconstitutional; and that parents, not government bureaucrats, have the right to decide what is appropriate for their children.”

The Supreme Court’s decision will most likely put an end to all the expensive litigation by individual states to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, and undoubtedly put a smile on the faces of children who have been patiently waiting to kill some nazi zombies.

Photo by BlackSpider-Man via DeviantArt