ABSTRACT
On June 27, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 2005 California law 1 that criminalized the sale of violent videogames to minors without parental supervision. The Supreme Court's landmark opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association affirmed what the videogame industry had been arguing for decades: Videogames are forms of expressive speech protected by the First Amendment. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia proclaimed:
Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, videogames communicate ideas—even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialog, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player's interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection (p. 2).
