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Hey we're really hurting on the economy, let's ban the idiots that dare run a successful business and bring needed tax revenue in! That'l fix the situation! How dare you try and run a business that may offend people in some way!

While I admire everyone's knee jerk reaction to defend video games via free speech I think this method of defense is inherently idiotic.

If someone came up to me and accused me of murder I wouldn't base my case on freedom of privacy. I would hope my lawyer could simply disprove the actual charges against me.

Fighting these sorts of things largely on free speech seems to imply that that video games are actually responsible for some sort of mayhem but should be protected anyway. They aren't dangerous. They don't pose a public threat and they shouldn't even be charged as such let alone 'allowed' to exist in spite of these accusations.

People need to educate the voting public that the 12 year old next to them on the laughing and bragging about how he shot a rifle through someone's head yesterday and made it explode isn't a deraged lunatic.

Video games out of context sound insane and dangerous. This is largely an educational problem which needs a good PR campaign. It's easier to defend something which people understand and like than it is to fight an abstract constitutional battle about the conflict between freedom and public well being.

People don't want to believe in bad people. Lets face it, some people are just rotten. It wasn't video games, it wasn't the comic books, or the rock music. Maybe something caused it other then nature, but if that's the case, I'm sure it was exposure to a lot of lead or a head injury that damaged a specific portion of the head during early childhood.

Until we realize that some people are rotten, and everybody is responsible for themselves, we're going to continue to creating stupid laws that make the word a worse place to live in.

Not for the violent tv-shows, movies etc ...

No, I'm not going to go along those lines - that's just adding to the fire of "ban violent [something]", and we haven't seen any good studies showing a link between virtual and real violence.

However, we HAVE seen how effective TV, radio and movie theaters are in turning a population against others, raising support for horrible behaviour, war ... lots of other stuff.

It's actually documented in Germany's own history [wikipedia.org]. Yes, I almost Godwin'ed myself, but in this case it's quite relevant, even though it is slightly trollish.

German law is full of such bizarre restrictions on freedom.

For example, in addition to the usual laws against slander and libel (which have some justification), Germany has laws and penalties for insulting someone, even in private and even if you don't state anything factually wrong.

Germany also has laws against any speech which might "disturb the public peace" or offend. What's the point of having free speech if you can't offend anybody? Didn't opposition to the monarchy or Hitler offend someone? Didn't Luther's 100 theses nailed to the Catholic church door offend the church?

There is essentially no anonymous speech, since all communications ports need to be registered and all electronic communications are tracked and logged. Registration, tracking, and surveillance of citizens in Germany seems to be so widespread that people don't even care anymore and just think it's the same way everywhere. People have the attitude that "as long as the government does it, it's OK, at least we aren't like the US, where Google tracks everybody", which is a bizarre view given Germany's history.

And it's not just the government that does it: some of Germany's biggest corporations have been illegally listening in on employees and customers and even forged communications.

It has to be said that Germany's government currently appears to be using its powers for benign purposes: policing, anti-terrorism, etc. But if parts of the government were abusing those powers, say to blackmail political opponents, who would know? And you only need to look at the 1930's to see how a progressive and liberal German government can turn into a genocidal regime bent on world conquest.

Somehow, the idea of "free speech" seems to have gotten lost in the translation after the Western allies laid the foundations for German democracy after WWII.

It's interesting how much of a cultural inversion Germany is from the United States. Here in the U.S. we practically cherish violence in our culture, while the Germans seem opposed to most violence we'd often consider "tame" by our standards. Yet, it's exactly opposite when it comes to sexually "explicit" content. We fear it so much, we actually fight among ourselves over whether or not we can safely discuss sex with our children outside of telling them "don't do it." In the meanwhile, you could practically go up to any magazine rack in Germany and find magazines for children featuring pictures of topless women that would only pass as pornography here in the U.S.

An interesting case in how differently we view violence as acceptable would be some past games like "Carmageddon", a title that was loosely based on the 70's movie "Death Race 2000". In the U.S., you could kill regular people in the streets with your car in the game. In the U.K., this was switched to zombies with green "blood". In Germany, this was replaced with robots.

This is yet another slew of ultra-pointless pre-election gibberish. Extremely violent videogames such as Manhunt are allready factually banned for public sale and sale to minors in Germany, based on laws existing since the dawn of the republic.

The rubbish on Computers, Videogames and the Internet that the ruling class in Germany has been putting out in recent years has reached staggering heights that are compareable to the situation in the US.

I for one am going to send in my support signature for the Piratenpartei [piratenpartei.de] (German branch of the Pirate Party) and do an all out vote for them whenever the occasion arises. If all German INet savy people do that, we could have the 5% hurdle for the Bundestag in no time. That'll teach them.

And if you are german, how about pitching in? Your signature [waehlepiraten.de] paves the way to the Bundestag. For once get off your fat lazy unpolitical geek ass and help roll Schäuble and Zensursula straight out of office. And screw the Greens (Grüne) on this one! Don't forget that Tritin and Fischer had a big hand in passing that Internet law a few years back ('Gesetz zum verbesserten Schutz des Urheberrechtes im Internet' aka 'German DMCA')!

Beweg' Deinen Arsch und tu' was! (visit links above)

My 2 Euros.