Where Politics And Video Games Collide

The last game I bought without a rating on the box was Burning Monkey Solitaire. It's relatively clean, with some innuendo. When I first played Hexxic, it was unrated. Are there ratings for the Super Granny games yet?

If you count downloadable games, and you have to, there are tons of games not rated and not Rating-Pending. And yet, almost all of them are clean, all ages game. Here are the problems I forsee beyond the unconstitutionality:

1) ESRB is voluntary and self-sustaining. It costs money to have a game rated. These seems like unfair business practices. Given the ESRB is in NYC, it sounds like they're holding the ratings for ransom for more taxes.

2) This clearly intends to squash innovention in independent software, as well as virtually eliminate freeware and open source games.

3) It will suddenly become legal to raid private residences on suspiscion that they have unrated games on their hard-drive. Thought-crime, anyone?

4) In the Bill:

Provision 1 uses "advocating or glamorizing: [list of bad things]." "Advocation" cannot be outlawed because of the First Amendment, as advocation is literally "speech." "Glamorizing" has no real legal definition, and determining that is an opinion.

Provisions 3 and 4 are self-contradictory as part 3 allows the retailer to set their own policies (already in place, people) and part three allows prosecution of violation of those policies.

Provision 7, "Provides the Courts the power to confiscate any materials that do not bear a rating and/or label clearly displayed." Prevents the display or sale of unrated games completely.

Provision 8, the one that requires a copy of the software to be reviewed at the retailer, is financially detrimental to small businesses forcing them to buy one copy of every game. Plus it says "owner, retailer, etc." of the business to provide the copy. What exactly is the "etc?"