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FCC to Require Broadcasters to Keep Tapes of Shows
The Importance of writes "Under current FCC rules, in order to make an indecency complaint about a broadcast you have to provide "a significant excerpt from the program or a full or partial tape or transcript of the program." However, broadcasters aren't required to keep a tape of their broadcasts so, rarely, an indecency complaint gets dismissed for lack of evidence. But that is going to change. The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [PDF] [TXT] that will require broadcasters to maintain recordings of their broadcasts for 60-90 days. The FCC is also considering reducing what you must claim in order to enter a complaint, thus opening the floodgates for indecency complaints by groups like the Parents Television Council, which is already keeping the FCC censors busy. Doesn't the government have better things to do?"
Doesn't the government have better things to do?
Uh, no.
Actually, between large numbers parents who vote (and organize themselves into pressure groups), and the large numbers of twentysomethings who don't vote, and teenagers who *can't* vote, who do you think makes a more effective pressure group? Who do you think the guv'mint will try to pander to?
Off topic: I've been reading this and been wondering about how much of this "won't someone think of the children" crap would still exist if legal age for voting was 14 or 15.
Go somewhere random
No, broadcasting something doesn't put it in the public domain. That's actually one reason cited for requiring the broadcasters to keep copies, becasue it's technically illegal for viewer/listeners to do so (aside from time-shifting).
and when you're (retroactively!) guilty?
I'd be very surprised if the FCC had the power to implement retroactive law. Under Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the US Constitution, no ex post facto law may be passed.
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If you have done nothing wrong, why not keep a record of what you have done? You only destroy evidence when you are guilty, right?
I think that this line of argument for forced recording of material is just like the old argument about hiding stuff: it is an attempt to impose more restrictions on innocent people.
I violently agree. I am a bc engineer, mostly retired.
Makeing us, the small market window on your home town here in the markets rated as 100+, responsible for what the networks feed us in the form of making us keep an aircheck tape of a 24/7/365 operation, at $20 an hour for the tape and another $10/hour or more for machine maintainance, will gain no real benefits to society at large, and will reduce our already too narrow operating margin by a considerable percentage. Its an expense smaller market stations cannot afford as it doesn't scale to the market size, but rather is a fixed expense regardless of the market ranking of the station.
For locally produced stuff, like our 5 times daily newscasts & morning cut-ins, yes, we do tape those, but asking us to save every tape for 60-90 days will multiply our tape costs by however many weeks that would be since like most, that tape has served its "review our own perfomance" duty at the end of the week, so tuesdays tape for the 12:00 noon cast is then re-written the next tuesday at 12.
These aren't $2.00 walmart vhs tapes folks.
From another viewpoint, we are simply incapable of responding in real time to bleep out a embargoed word when carrying what the networks feed us, or of recognizing and setting up an overlay fuzzball in real time of such goings on as the "wardrobe malfunction" during the superbowl. Our operators were as wide-eyed as the rest of the world at that instance.
Such regulatory actions rightfully should be directed to the source of the program, and not the 1700 something broadcast tv stations under the commissions purview.
As it is, we spend around 60 man hours a week scanning the syndicated and one time stuff that comes in on tape before we air it, and often wind up editing out a word or 3, but since we cannot do that to the syndi's tape, its their copyrighted property, that means we have to make yet another dub on our own tape.
This is an ill-conceived idea, really.
Cheers, Gene