Jack Thompson's Violent Game Bill Signed Into Law 368
simoniker writes "Louisiana Democratic Representative Roy Burrell's HB1381 bill, covering violent videogames, has been signed into law by Governor Kathleen Blanco. The law takes effect immediately, the latest in a very long line of video game-related bills specific to one U.S. State. The measure proposed by HB 1381, which was drafted with the help of controversial Florida attorney and anti-game activist Jack Thompson, allows a judge to rule on whether or not a videogame meets established criteria for being inappropriate for minors and be subsequently pulled from store shelves. A person found guilty of selling such a game to a minor would face fines ranging from $100 to $2,000, plus a prison term of up to one year. Needless to say, the ESA will likely be mounting a legal challenge to this bill in the very near future."
Dear Mr. Thompson (Score:5, Interesting)
1:) Prove it
2:) If you can't do you as an attorney know what Libel is?
3:) IIRC Libel can be grounds for revocation of your BAR registration.
How does he do it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I want to drive to Louisiana and kick this guy in the nuts.
On the Other hand (Score:1, Interesting)
How is this bill supposed to work? (Score:4, Interesting)
The bill's intent is to keep adult-oriented (this criteria to be determined by a judge) games from getting into minor's hands, and fines any store responsible for selling said games to minors. This is not necessarily a bad thing; one of the biggest weaknesses of the ESRB is its lack of real power: it lacks any and all punitive ability. It can assign ratings all it wants, but when it comes down to it, individual store policy determines who can buy any given game. Clearly this has been ineffective in keeping inappropriate games from the hands of minors. We can argue all day long that: "this is the responsibility of the parents, zomg the government is evil, how dare they try to say that killing hookers is bad, zomg," but really the gaming industry lacks any coherent self-regulation and this needs to change.
Unfortunately, this bill is one step in the right direction (fining retailers who sell GTA3 to ten year olds) and three steps in the wrong (absolutely no specification as to what can be considered "inappropriate," granting sole discretion to the judge, and calling for any "inappropriate game" to be pulled from circulation.) The last wrong is the one that concerns me the most: since when does content "not suitable for minors" suddenly translate into "not suitable for sale?" That seems to me a gross overextension of what the bill should be trying to do, which is to keep minors from playing excessively violent or sexual games. It's no secret that idiots like Jack Thompson believe the world would be a better place without video games, period, but it shocks me that any legislature would buy into this. There are plenty of types of media (rape-pornography, for instance) that the courts currently do not have the ability to demand be removed from circulation. I'm supposed to believe that ANY game could be more harmful to society than the simulation of rape? That doesn't make any sense at all.
Re:Dear Mr. Thompson (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I love paying for people to live in dangerous a (Score:1, Interesting)
who's fault? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I love paying for people to live in dangerous a (Score:2, Interesting)
Hurricanes are a piece of cake to deal with. I'd rather deal with them then earthquakes or tornados.
Re:Dear Mr. Thompson (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Claiming that someone is engaging in fraud is not lobbying; that is a very specific legal term which Jack should understand and only use in its legal context. When used in a fashion that cannot be proven, against a person, business, or industry intentionally to harm their reputation, it could be construed as slander.
3. Committing libel against an industry to further your own agenda impacts both honest and integrity. You cannot claim that the industry is committing fraud when there is no evidence that they have done so.
My 2 cents. (Score:2, Interesting)
As much as some folks are right, and we Americans really do need to find someone to blame all the time, while I was at EB I saw some pretty shockingly irresponsible parenting. People would come in wanting to buy GTA: San Andreas for their 13 year old. We would ask whenever someone who looked like a parent was buying it whether they knew what the content was like, if they were buying it for a child, etc. Sursprisingly, only about 4 in 10 parents decided that beating police officers to death with a purple dildo was inappropriate for their 13 year old. Then there were the parents that would come in with little kids, one or two or a handful, sometimes so young they had to reach up to get to the controllers on our display systems, talk to them for a minute at the front of the store, and then walk away and leave the kid there to play. We told the parents they couldn't leave their kids alone in the store when we could, but we were busy, and you can't spend every waking moment looking at the door. I escorted probably 10-15 kids a month to the mall concierge, where their parents were paged. Mostly they were just shopping for clothes or something and thought it'd be a better idea to leave their kid alone with strangers in a mall than risk him being bored, but there were times when they didn't even stay in the mall. I'd be walking out at the end of my shift and see a kid sitting at the concierge's desk from 2-4 hours past. I've given trying to comprehend the thought process of some of these parents and resigned myself to the fact that there probably isn't one.
Re:Redundant? (Score:2, Interesting)
Jack Thompson Interviewed by a Free-Marketeer (Score:3, Interesting)
Mr. Thompson comes across as a deluded, selfimportant, lawerish, jack-ass of an individual. Granted, the host was intentionally pushing his buttons ("I think it should be legal for convenience stores to sell beer to 10-year olds! Parents will boycott the place and it'll go out of business... let the market sort it out!") but surly Mr. Thompson knew this was going to be an interview with someone whose views were diametrically opposed to his own. Surely he could have at least engaged in a real, 2-way debate?
Thompson got so irked by the free-market ideas, he wouldn't even discuss the concept. He hung up on the interview! What an infantile, childish little busybody! These are the kind of asses that make this kind of law to "protect the children!"
Here's the clip:
http://freetalklive.com/files/thompson.mp3 [freetalklive.com]
Morality, Ethics, and Political Science (Score:3, Interesting)
But what I was trying to get across in my original post was that morality _ISN'T_ just some set of common values. That's like saying that reality is just a set of common beliefs. In some lesser sense you could use the words to mean "common values" or "common beliefs", e.g. "the morality/reality of such-and-such culture is ________", in an anthropological, descriptive sense. But the same way that it doesn't make sense to say that what actually is real changes from culture to culture, or that the world may be round here in California but flat in some backwards luddite society in Nebraska, it makes no sense that what is actually moral changes from culture to culture either. What people believe and what people value changes, and those beliefs and values reflect what people THINK is real or moral, but they mustn't be mistaken for what is actually real or actually moral. That's why the most moral thing to do is to live according to your values and let others live according to theirs, and avoid stepping on each other's toes, so to speak. That way everybody gets what they value as best as possible.
Ethics is the study of what is right and what is wrong; the study of morality. Political science just is applied ethics. And actual government is, of course, applied political science. So morality is the goverment's job. But since morality is not just common values, forcing some particular set of common values on people is not the government's job. Back to the original topic: this anti-game legislation is not the government enforcing morality. It's the government enforcing value. It's not the government looking out for people's freedom and safety, protecting them from one another and allowing them to pursue what they value; it's the government helping one group against others, and telling them what they should value. That's not moral. That's not the government's job.