Utah Bill to Mature Rated Games Away From Underage Buyers

The state legislators in the state of Utah have introduced a bill that when enacted will ban the sale of video games that get the M or Mature rating from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to those under the age of 17. Other states have introduced previous bills to ban sales of M rated games to minors in the past but were killed due to concerns that such potential laws could be ruled to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

All pornography and movies that are rated R or NC-17 are not sold to minors without any concern about the First Amendment so why should Mature rated video games be any different? Are the state legislators just afraid of incurring the wrath of the retailers that sell video games or the ACLU.

Living in a province in Canada where the sale of Mature rated video games to minors is banned there is absolutely no freedom of speech issues. Anybody who claims such are going to be game developers who just using putting more and more violence and sexual content just to sell video games instead of creating better games.

Canada Needs Election to Kill Copywrong Bill

If an expected Canadian election gets called at the end of the week it will kill one of the worst pieces of legislation on the order paper. Bill C-61 the bill to "reform" Canada's copyright act which has been stuck having only made it past first reading won't even make it past parliament.

This hasn't been the first time that a bill dealing with copyright legislation was lost due to an election. When the Liberal minority government was toppled in 2005, there was a copyright bill that died on the order paper.

Like the previous bill this copyright bill contains provisions that would create a clone of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the highly unpopular legislation in the United States. A ban on circumventing Digital Rights Management (DRM) is one of the provisions that is contained in both the DMCA and C-61. This ban on removing DRM is considered by many to strip citizens of their right to fair use of copyrighted works that they own. Ripping movies off of DVD's onto a computer for viewing in another location at another time will become illegal in Canada as it is now in the United States.

Bill C-61 also implements the use of the Broadcast flag technology which is supposed to prevent recording of television shows that are transmitted in a digital format be it Digital Cable or Satellite or OTA DTV. The use of the Broadcast Flag was banned in the United States because the supreme court felt that it violated fair use rights.

The cries of "I don't want another election" still ring out from citizens from coast to coast. To them and the politicians who represent us and potential politicians wanting to represent us, I've got three words for them "Bring it on"