I found it interesting that Scalia, who is the most conservative/religious member of the Court, not only voted with the majority but even wrote the opinion.
My guess is that as a father of 9 kids and a grand-father of even more, he's seen firsthand how nominal an impact video games have on minors.
In my experience, the most vocal opponents of violence in video games don't actually have any video-game playing children of their own.
It's more simple than that: Scalia is a constitutional originalist. He belongs to the right-wing judicial camp that believes the constitution means what it says. Sometimes he gets it wrong and I have no doubt his personal life and culture influences his decisions. But a strong first amendment stance is consistent with originalism.
Outsiders might not realize it but not all "conservatives" are cut from the same cloth. There is a rich and diverse right-wing ideological taxonomy.
Although I don't understand how he reconciles that with his rather strict views on "obscenity" and how that can be strictly regulated.
The constitution doesn't specifically address either, yet nudity can absolutely be regulated (or according to Scalia completely banned) while violence is just fine.
Justice Scalia considers historical exceptions that were accepted at the time that the First Amendment was ratified. His view is that there was such an exception for "obscenity", but not for violence.
He was pretty protective in his opinion in Kyllo (the whole "general public use" assertion being deemed a potential factor, not a determination, in the restriction of an expectation of privacy), though it was centralized on the place as holding an expectation of privacy, not the person.
Though he dissented in Bond (2000), the combination of those two rulings may give fairly powerful protections against technological surveillance.
The Constitution specifically authorizes federal copyright laws. "To Promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
There are many problems with copyright, but the ones a "constitutional originalist" should take issue with from that quote are that:
First, inventors and authors frequently aren't the ones who hold exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries under copyright law, as their rights are often signed over to others; and these rights are often continued to be held even after the authors and inventors die.
Second, there weren't any movies or videos or even recordings back when the US Constitution was written, so their writings couldn't possibly directly apply to these media.
It takes interpretation on the parts of these supposed "constitutional originalist" justices to decree that these new media do in fact fall under copyright law.
the supreme court's "liberals" and "conservatives" aren't really divided along the lines that exist in the legislature. scalia is a pretty strict constitutional originalist and pretty consistently gives broad support to free speech.
I'm not so sure of that. We don't get an exact transcript of what he said, nor what he was asked. It appears to me that he may have actually been thinking of "adult (or mature) video games" as pornography, which has always been subject to regulation. The opinion was quite clear in distinguishing obscenity (a term limited by SCOTUS to sexual content) from violence. It's not obvious to me whether the conversation recounted in that article was nearly so clear.
My guess is that as a father of 9 kids and a grand-father of even more, he's seen firsthand how nominal an impact video games have on minors.
In my experience, the most vocal opponents of violence in video games don't actually have any video-game playing children of their own.