MIAMI - A Florida judge has ordered a video game company to hand over a new unreleased game because it allegedly teaches minors methods of bullying and school violence.
The action came as a surprise to some First Amendment scholars who said that Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Ronald Friedman refused to review Take Two Interactive’s video game “Bully,” before making his judgment, Cnet Networks reported. This ruling could have an impact on other forms of entertainment, they said, such as movies, television shows and adult videos.
Retailers Wal-Mart and GameStop have also been named as defendants in the case.
At issue is a lawsuit filed by anti-videogame attorney Jack Thompson who is asking the court to “grant dome relief to stop the witless, crass release of this game in five days.”
But Robert Corn-Revere, a partner of the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine in Washington D.C. said the fact the game is not yet on the market would make it difficult for a judge to make a ruling on its potential impact without reviewing it first.
Take Two, which also makes “Grand Theft Auto,” video game, would not comment.
Thompson says in his suit that the game teaches minors how to become a bully and how to cause school violence and asks the court to declare it a “public nuisance.”
Corn-Revere said that the case echoes a similar 1931 Supreme Court case, Near v. Minnesota in which the justices struck down a state law and an injunction that regulated so-called “scandalous” news stories as a public nuisance.
According to the game’s Web page, player must “stand up to bullies, get picked on by teachers, play pranks, win or lose the girl, and ultimately learn to navigate the obstacles of the worst school around, Bullworth Academy.”
David Greene of the First Amendment Project, said that the ruling is akin to film review boards of the past in which many states operated panels that often times failed to review films for content before banning them altogether.
Greene said the First Amendment allows for free speech and that only after it causes harm, and someone is injured do the courts step in to whether such speech is harmful.
The game was scheduled to be made available for Sony’s Playstation 2 console.
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