John Bruce Thompson
Disbarred Not Eligible to practice in Florida
ID Number: - 231665
Address: 5721 Riviera Dr, Coral Gables, Florida 331462750, United States
Phone: 305.6664366
E-Mail: amendmentone@comcast.net
County: Miami-Dade
Circuit: 11
Admitted: 05/31/1977

You can read the official document on the Florida Bar’s website. You may also want to consult the Wikipedia entry for Jack Thompson (attorney), which highlights his failed career as a right-wing hack:

Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton.

Goodbye Jack, we won’t miss your attacks on our rights to freedom.

Kotaku also reports that Counterstrike “in the vision of specialists, teaches war techniques” and that Everquest “takes the player to total nonsense and heavy psychological conflicts, because the quests he receives may be good or bad.”

More amusingly, Everquest is not even officially sold in Brazil, and the offensive Counterstrike content where “Rio de Janeiro drug dealers kidnap and take to a slum three UN representative s” and “the police invade the place and are welcomed with bullets” refers to a user created map, CS_rio. Lol, it’s ok Brazil, we have politicians like that too in America; they’re called Hillary Clinton.

In his letter to Bill Gates, Microsoft is only again abused by anti-game activist Jack Thompson’s latest barrage of threats, threats that stem from an over-zealous confusion of moral value and necessity of legal action.  The game that’s pissing Mr. Thompson this time is Halo 3 for the Xbox 360, a game that he calls “hyperviolent.”  Furthermore, he erroneously alleges that the original Halo was the source of inspiration for Lee Boyd Malvo, the DC Beltway sniper, and that Halo allowed Malvo to become “remarkably efficient” in his killing.  However, JT couldn’t leave his letter as a mere judgment of Halo 3’s content, so he decided to threaten Gates with legal action if it didn’t prevent the sale of it to minors.  Here’s Jack Thompson’s letter in full to Microsoft’s Chairman Bill Gates:

Bill Gates
Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, Washington

Re: Halo 3

Dear Mr. Gates:

As you know, the Federal Trade Commission has repeatedly found that games rated “Mature” by the video game industry-captured Entertainment Software Rating Board are routinely sold to kids under the age of 17 despite the age rating. The most recent failure rate of the ratings on “Mature” games, according to the FTC, is 42%. The entire rating system is a fraud, and “broken,” the latter description aptly provided by Senator Hillary Clinton.

As you also know, Lee Boyd Malvo trained on Microsoft’s Halo to further enable him to become the remarkably efficient “DC Beltway Sniper.” That was reported by NBC News at the time and was noted in Malvo’s criminal trial.

You appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes II and rather revealing and usefully noted that “the cool thing about these games is that they transport you to a world you think is real.” Precisely. Capcom has recently disclosed to investors that your video game industry’s violent games, sold to children, pose a real hazard to the health of the industry. Right on.

The hyperviolent Microsoft Xbox 360 game Halo 3 is scheduled by your company for commercial release in September of this year. The Beta version that was released last week shows us all just how violent the game is and how inappropriate it is for play by anyone under 17, as the “Mature” rating it will surely receive indicates.

Here’s the deal, Mr. Gates: Either Microsoft undertakes dramatic, real steps, through its marketing, wholesale, and retail operations to assure that Halo 3 is not sold, via the Internet and in stores, directly to anyone under 17, or I shall proceed to make sure that Microsoft is held to that standard by appropriate legal means. I have done that before successfully as to Best Buy, and I shall do so again as to Microsoft and all retailers of Halo 3.

Regards, Jack Thompson

I wonder what will come of Mr. Thompson’s latest endeavors.  Will he successfully sue Microsoft for perceived crimes of passivity?  How will he be able to prove Microsoft culpable for the legal violations of retailers who sell its games?  We’ll keep you posted.

But now, Take Two Interactive has recieved grand jury subpoenas from the “Manhattan attorney’s office, seeking information about a range of its business practices dating back to 2001 and the inclusion of sexually explicit material in one of its games”.  This development has caused Take Two’s stock to tumble “nearly 19 percent, to $10.44, a 52-week low”.  As the public catches whiff of Hot Coffee again, the online petitions are becoming all-the-more conspicuous.  For better or for worse, “Hot Coffee” is a stale brew of the past, re-heated again for a second swig.

It sounds like another frivolous lawsuit to me, and in no way a “class-action”. Defective Xboxes represent an incredibly small fraction of the total units sold (as it should be), and thus its unlikely that this is a fruitful lawsuit. At best, the prosecutors are looking at a restitution similar to that of the PS2 lawsuit (which was just settled): $25, a game, and any necessary repairs/replacements. And how long did the PS2 lawsuit take to get settled? Almost until the Xbox 360 came out…