Supreme Court game-bill ruling may come today

A decision in the ongoing US Supreme Court case over California's controversial violent games bill may be just around the corner. Today, the office of US Senator Leland Yee, who authored the at-issue California Assembly Bill 1179, issued a statement indicating that the US's highest federal court may announce its ruling tomorrow morning.

Look for the Supreme Court's ruling on CA Bill 1179 tomorrow morning.

In the event that the Supreme Court's ruling on the matter does occur tomorrow, Senator Yee stated that he will hold a press conference at 10:00 a.m. PDT in San Francisco to discuss and respond to it. In March, representatives from Activision, family-advocacy group Common Sense Media, and Stanford Constitutional Law Center reached agreement that the Supreme Court was likely to side with the game industry in its ruling.

Senator Yee plans to be flanked by a number of doctors, law enforcement officials, and child advocates at the press conference. These supporters include San Francisco police chief Gregory Suhr, as well as representatives from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, California Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and Women Organized to Make Abuse Nonexistent.

Shortly after California Assembly Bill 1179 was signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005, it was challenged in court before it could take effect. In 2007, the circuit court judgewho struck down the law as unconstitutional admitted he was "sympathetic to what the legislature sought to do." Last year, an appellate court judge backed up the original ruling.

The bill sought to ban the sale or rental of "violent video games" to children. A "violent" game was defined as a "game in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being."

Under the law, retailers that sold such games would be subject to a $1,000 fine. The bill would also have required "violent" video games to bear a two-inch-by-two-inch sticker with a "solid white '18' outlined in black" on their front covers. That's more than twice the size of the labels that currently adorn game-box covers and display the familiar Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rating.