Brown V. Entertainment Merchants Association Summary

The case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association began on October 7, 2005, when California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill into law that placed restrictions on the sale and rental of certain video games. This bill, known as Assembly Bill 1179, restricted individuals under the age of 18 from purchasing or renting video games that contained violence in the forms of “killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being”. This law also required that all video games “distributed in California. . . shall be labeled with a solid white ‘18’” and carried a penalty of up to one thousand dollars for violators. A complaint challenging the law was filed by Entertainment Merchants Association on October 17, 2005. On December 21, 2005, U.S. District Judge Ronald White granted a preliminary injunction filed by the plaintiffs that denied enforcement of the law while the case was being resolved. Judge Whyte later granted a permanent injunction on August 6, 2007, declaring that the law violated the First Amendment. On September 5, 2007, the defendants appealed the permanent injunction to the …show more content…
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech”. As Justice Scalia stated in the opinion of the Court, including a quote from Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson: “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. And ‘the basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary’ with a new and different communication medium”. Justice Scalia also referred to the case Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union when he stated that the “government lacks the power to restrict expression because of its message, ideas, subject matter, or