/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/49753000/jpg/_49753218_010544325-1.jpg" width="304" height="171" alt="Grand Theft Auto"span style="width:304px;"There is conflicting evidence over the effect of violent games/span /div div class="story-feature related narrow"Related Stories/div p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1"The US Supreme Court has struck down a Californian law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to those aged under 18./p pThe court voted 7-2 to uphold an appeals court ruling that declared the law contrary to free speech rights enshrined in the US Constitution./p pVideo game publishers challenged the 2005 measure, which never took effect because of legal proceedings./p pSupporters argued the law was needed as violent games could harm children./p pSpeaking at the Supreme Court on Monday, Justice Antonin Scalia said: "Our cases hold that minors are entitled to a significant degree of First Amendment protection./p p"Government has no free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which they may be exposed." /p pThe US video game industry has about $10.5bn (pound;6.55bn) in annual sales./ppThe 2005 California law prohibited the sale of violent video games to children "where a reasonable person would find that the violent content appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors, is patently offensive to prevailing community standards as to what is suitable for minors, and causes the game as a whole to lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors". /p pUnder the law, parents could still purchase violent video games for their children, but retailers caught selling the titles to minors could face a fine of up to $1,000 (pound;625) for each game. /p pAfter a legal challenge by industry groups, a district court and then the court of appeals stopped the law coming into effect./p pCourts in six other states have also reached similar conclusions, striking down bans./p pThere is already a nationwide voluntary system of game classification in the US./ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8wN2-D3xsmLbe0szlyZEOgsZRB8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8wN2-D3xsmLbe0szlyZEOgsZRB8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8wN2-D3xsmLbe0szlyZEOgsZRB8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8wN2-D3xsmLbe0szlyZEOgsZRB8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/H5gqpMsvz0Q" height="1" width="1"/