"The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
Now lets look at info on the the law CA tried to pass in 2006 that got voted down by Scotus in Brown VS EMA, found on this site. I quote:
" AB 1792, as amended, Yee. Violent video games. Existing lawprohibits the distribution of harmful matter, as defined, to minors. Existing law defines harmful matter with reference to, among other things, its appeal to the prurient interest and its depiction of sexual conduct. This bill would set forth legislative findings and declarations regarding the harmful effects of violent video games on minors. It wouldprohibit a person from knowingly distributing or exhibiting to a minor any video game that appeals to minors' morbid interest in violence, that enables the player to virtually inflict serious injury upon human beings or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, as defined, and that lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill would exclude from this prohibition any game in which the visual depiction of violence occurs as the result of simultaneous competition between 2 or more players , as specified.... <BLAH BLAH BLAH>"
Notice how the bill "borrows" the obscenity statute as a guide that CA would use to decide what games would be fined? The utterly subjective and biased "lacks serious artistic, political, or scientific value for minors" could be used to fine ANY game that offended the judges in CA, and no store would even know what could be fined, leading to the mass taking of any game that has any violent content off the shelves, period. IMHO, this was the reason SCOTUS found the bill unconstitutional. Now what does this do with any filtering of Porn or Obscenity being abused to filter violent game sites?
If the CA bill abused the obscenity statute to try to give CA the right to accidentally or purposely cause a chain reaction of stores taking violent games off the shelf, by fining games that offend them, what's to stop the government filter to be abused, to filter out sites for games that have some sexual content, Duke3d, etc? Even if the filter itself is put into filter Porn sites, you saw from my previous article how filters many times also block gaming sites anyway.. And stupid ones like ones for tame games rather than violent ones. The Libraries of Conservative states already filter out any and all "harmful to minors" things which could be abused by libraries to filter out violent game sites. What's to stop the GOP to filter out other "undesirables" like sites for violent games, file sharing, web mail, file hosting, blogs, video game modding sites, secretly in a filter that is publicly advertised as an anti-porn filter, but has all things the GOP simply like, like those kinds of sites, put in it's filter, secretly?
