United States of America

[US] Supreme Court to review indecency cases

IRIS 1996-1:1/14

Michael Botein

Media Center, New York Law School

The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to review a decision by a lower federal court, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, upholding as constitutional provisions of the 1992 Cable Act, which require cable operators to segregate indecent "access" channel programming onto a separate, "blocked" channel - unless it totally banned indirect material from its system to begin with. A subscriber could receive this channel only by affirmatively asking a cable operator to "unblock" the channel for a particular household. The lower court had held that this was the "least restrictive means" of dealing with indecent access programming.