As reported during the weekend, the Supreme Court started examining legislation from California that would make the sale of violent video games to minors illegal.
The Schwarzenegger vs EMA case landed in the highest court in the United States and the reaction of the court can only fairly be described as very critical. Justice Antonin Scalia in particular had a lot of questions to ask the California attorney general, who was arguing for the law previously declared unconstitutional by a lower court.
“I am concerned with the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” Scalia said. “It was always understood that the freedom of speech did not include obscenity. It has never been understood that the freedom of speech did not include portrayals of violence. You are asking us to create a whole new prohibition. What’s next after violence? Drinking? Movies that show drinking? Smoking?”
Scalia also took issue with the use of the term “deviant violent videogames” used by proponents of the law. “As opposed to what? A normal violent videogame?” asked Scalia. “Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim, to tell you the truth… Are you going to ban them too?” he added.
President Obama’s Supreme Court picks, Justice Elana Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, also pressured California attorney general, Zackery Morazzimi. “One of the studies, the Anderson study, says that the effect of violence is the same for a Bugs Bunny episode as it is for a violent video. So can the legislature now, because it has that study, outlaw Bugs Bunny?” Sotomayor said.
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Result for: congress
The iPhone Dev Team has released the first official iPhone 4 jailbreak this week, using a browser-based exploit.
However, some of the users that have jailbroken their device has reported broken MMS and broken FaceTime.
Hacker “comex” released the option via jailbreakme.com, and visitors to the site on their iPhone 4 devices can start the jailbreaking process right from their phone browser.
The iPhone Dev Team’s hack is the first for the device, despite hacker Geohot’s claims to an iPhone 4 jailbreak last month.
As a note, iPads running iOS 3.2.1 will not be able to jailbreak their devices.
Making this jailbreak different than pretty much every other one before it, is the fact that it is completely browser-based, using the Apple Safari browser.
The hack comes a week after the U.S. Library of Congress officially made jailbreaking legal.
Result for: congress
New DMCA exemptions announced by the Librarian Of Congress make it legal, at least in the US, to jailbreak mobile phones. The new exemption also allows the rooting of Android devices.
The Librarian Of Congress found that jailbreaking is generally done to enable fair use under US copyright law and that the objections of mobile phone providers and vendors were based on business model concerns rather than copyright protection. The exemption for unlocking phones for use on different mobile phone providers’ networks was also renewed.
The exemption, which was proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and strenuously opposed by Apple, could open the floodgates for iPhone apps from major software vendors which would never have been available otherwise.
In addition to the EFF, the jailbreaking exemption was backed by such big names as Mozilla Corporation and Skype.
Thanks to Apple’s use of encrypted code during the boot process it was previously a DMCA violation to reverse engineer the iOS. This has allowed them, through the App Store approval process and SDK Terms Of Service, to tightly control what apps were available for the iPhone and even what tools could be used to create them.
The new rules could result in Adobe either releasing Flash for jailbroken iPhones or placing new emphasis on the Adobe AIR Packager for iPhone, introduced in the recently released Flash Professional CS5. Changes in the iPhone SDK TOS earlier this year prompted Adobe to halt future development of the tool.
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