vidGuy

@Punkrawk Bbob

Do you not get the reference then? Too young to know the "master of unlocking" line, which was in the original RE (linked, in color), not RE2 (above, in B&W)?

Anyway, enough with this.

That. Was. Excellent.

@(Unverified)

I don't disagree, but it was the intellectual property holders that would benefit from such laws. Since the ESA protects the IP holders, not consumers, it had an economic incentive to support those bills. You can be upset with them not thinking about the wider picture, but they were just trying to obtain a better financial position.

But what reasons did California have for seeking to ban violent games, other than spending taxpayer dollars to step in for parents? They tried to make the argument that games lead to real life violence, but the Court rejected the scant surveys on that.

I'd say that infringing on constitutional rights without any counterbalancing benefit to society is the real enemy.

@Iamdude

The ESA is a private trade association. It is spending money to support laws that would protect its members' constitutional rights.

The states are spending tax money in attempts to pass laws that would restrict its citizens' constitutional rights.

Big difference.

The nice thing about the majority opinion in Brown v. EMA was that it essentially foreclosed any attempt to ban violent video games, saying that better definitions of "violence" were not enough given the constitutional right to access speech and the lack of evidence that violent media hurts anyone. It didn't really give states any room to try to craft new laws around the ruling.

@pluupy

RE was amazing back in the day. It loses a lot of its luster with its famous "tank controls" and anything from that era is hard to enjoy now because of the jaggies, but there is good reason that RE and RE2 are still considered among the best in their generation.

It still managed to scare you despite the original's cheesy intro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw5sQn5Cviw

@Punkrawk Bbob

First, the link to the GameBoy Color game is in, you know, color. Is your monitor broken? Second, this was clearly a joke.

Now think about what you said.

Forget unlocking, I would be the master of smashing that GBC cartridge if I had ever played that.

@Softserve

There are good reasons for the focus on foreigners. In particular, anyone hosting infringing content from within the US is easy to get at and take down. If the content is hosted outside of the US, though, there are problems of jurisdiction and extending US copyright law abroad. These bills intended to minimize those problems.

@Lerkero

Free speech rights create many limits to trademark rights, not just parody. Did you notice that this post used the words "Battlefield 3"? Did you know those words are trademarked? http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:vn68f5.2.1

That's nominative fair use of trademark at work there, under the "news reporting" prong. The question here is not whether they used the mark, but whether they actually traded on the mark. It's a legal distinction that turns on the intent of the use and whether consumers are confused about the sponsorship (or lack thereof) by Textron.