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Publisher Confidential: What Librarians Want Publishers to Know

I like this: Publisher Confidential. Writers might find it useful too.

It?s from the creators of Unshelved, who have been talking, and listening, to public librarians for a long time. You can download Publisher Confidential (PDF), free!

Law librarians could probably add a few more pages, but we?re not as restrained as the public librarians featured in Publisher Confidential. Maybe we?ve just been pushed a bit too much and too hard in the past couple of decades and are may be approaching ?Fleeting Expletives? territory.

That is to say: U.S. Supreme Court: FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc. (No. 07-582), decided: 4/28/09:

?Federal law bans the broadcasting of "any ... indecent ... language," 18 U. S. C. §1464, which includes references to sexual or excretory activity or organs, see FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U. S. 726. Having first defined the prohibited speech in 1975, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a cautious, but gradually expanding, approach to enforcing the statutory prohibition. In 2004, the FCC's Golden Globes Order declared for the first time that an expletive (nonliteral) use of the F-Word or the S-Word could be actionably indecent, even when the word is used only once.

This case concerns isolated utterances of the F- and S-Words during two live broadcasts aired by Fox Television Stations, Inc. In its order upholding the indecency findings, the FCC, inter alia, stated that the Golden Globes Order eliminated any doubt that fleeting expletives could be actionable; declared that under the new policy, a lack of repetition weighs against a finding of indecency, but is not a safe harbor; and held that both broadcasts met the new test because one involved a literal description of excrement and both invoked the F-Word. The order did not impose sanctions for either broadcast. The Second Circuit set aside the agency action, declining to address the constitutionality of the FCC's action but finding the FCC's reasoning inadequate under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

Held: The judgment is reversed, and the case is remanded. 489 F. 3d 444, reversed and remanded.?

Full post as published by Oregon Legal Research on May 05, 2009 (boomark / email).