Interactive Digital Software Ass'n v. St. Louis County

Citation: Interactive Digital Software Ass'n v. St. Louis County, 329 F.3d 954 (8th Cir. 2003).

A St. Louis ordinance that makes it unlawful to allow minors to play violent videogame]s without their parents’ consent has been declared [[unconstitutional by a federal Court of Appeals. The appellate court held that the ordinance violates the First Amendment. The

ruling was issued in a lawsuit filed against St. Louis County by the Interactive Digital Software Association and other organizations and companies that create, distribute and sell or rent videogames.

The Court of Appeals’ opinion, written by Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold, was short and to the point. It reverses a District Court decision that had held that videogames are not speech, and that even if they are, the ordinance was narrowly tailored to satisfy a compelling governmental interest.

Judge Arnold noted that “If the First Amendment is versatile enough to ‘shield [the] painting of Jackson Pollack, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll’" &mdash; as the Supreme Court has said it is &mdash; “we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in videogames are not entitled to a similar protection.”

Indeed, the appellate court’s review of some of the videogames at issue in the case convinced it, Judge Arnold said, that “these ‘violent’ video games contain stories, imagery, ‘age-old themes of literature,’ and messages, ‘even an “ideology,” just as books and movies do.’” As a result, “‘they are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best literature.’“

Judge Arnold classified the ordinance as a content-based restriction, because it applies only to violent videogames and thus regulates videogames based on their content. This meant that the ordinance was “presumptively invalid,” and required St. Louis to prove that it was narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest.

St. Louis argued that the ordinance served two compelling interests: “protecting the ‘psychological well-being of minors’“; and “assisting parents to be the guardians of their children’s well-being.” However, Judge Arnold ruled that St. Louis had not proved that

either was a compelling interest.

The judge found that St. Louis had failed to prove that the psychological health of children who play violent videogames suffers. In order to show the ordinance was constitutional, St. Louis should have offered “empirical support for its belief that ‘violent’ video games cause psychological harm to minors,” Judge Arnold said.

The judge also observed that no Supreme Court decision had ever “suggest[ed] that the government’s role in helping parents to be the guardians of their children’s well-being is an unbridled license to governments to regulate what minors read and view.”

As a result, Judge Arnold remanded the case to the District Court “for entry of an injunction” against enforcement of the ordinance.