The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of Schwarzenegger vs. EMA urging the Supreme Court to affirm the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision declaring that a California law banning the sale or rental of any video game containing violent content to minors, and requiring manufacturers to label such games, is unconstitutional.

The CBLDF views the California law as typical of misguided attempts by government improperly attempting to regulate content by using junk science.   Laws like the 2005 California statute are enacted by politicians acting out of moral panic and the politically popular but overly vague desire “to protect innocent children.” 

Just like Stan Lee, who wrote an open letter to the Video Game Voters Network (see “Stan Lee Stands Up for Videogames”), the CBLDF sees a parallel between current attempts to regulate videogames and the anti-comic book crusades in 1950s.

The CBLDF’s Executive Director Charles Brownstein put it this way: “The case California makes against video games is one familiar to the comic book industry, which was nearly destroyed by government attempts at regulation in the 1950s.  Then, as now, moral crusaders claimed that popular new media containing depictions of violence were detrimental to our youth. Then, as now, pseudo-science was used to back such claims.  Those claims weren't true in the 1950s, and they aren't true now.”

Brownstein adds, "We hope that the Supreme Court denies California's attempt to diminish the First Amendment, and spares the video game industry the fate that was suffered by the comic book industry in the past.  We also encourage them to deny California's claims so that comic books and other media don't suffer under a new constitutional standard that creates new categories of unprotected speech and diminishes the First Amendment rights of minors."