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Bill to Bring A La Carte, Indecency Regs to Cable
An anonymous reader writes "A bill introduced this week would force cable operators to offer à la carte cable and so-called family-tiers of service. Those opting for à la carte programming would get refunds on their cable bill, but the legislation would also extend broadcast indecency standards to cable and satellite TV for the first time: 'In accordance with the indecency and profanity policies and standards applied by the [FCC] to broadcasters, as such policies and standards are modified from time to time, not transmit any material that is indecent or profane on any channel in the expanded basic tier of such distributor except between 10pm and 6am.' As Ars points out, 'With the parental controls built into every television set, set-top box, and DVR being sold these days, the need for such legislation seems questionable at best. Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite.'"
Or simply lose a lot of cool ("indy") channels that don't get enough sponsorship to survive on their own?
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
Now I'm even more confused. If you can get any channel you want a la carte, then why do you need to impose indecency regs on channels. I could almost see the logic when you had to get Spike and TNT in order to get Nickelodeon for the kids, but now if you can cherry pick the safe channels you specifically want (and as such, pick the not so safe at your discretion), you should do away with the regs and let the market sort out what people are willing to pay for.
"extend broadcast indecency standards to cable and satellite TV for the first time: "
the price they want is too high.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
...when we complained about the FCC's censorship, we were told: Oh, you can get cable if you want uncensored stuff.
And they they started labeling everything and building controls into TVs to filter by rating. That was okay, because they told us, with everything labeled, people could complain less about 'inappropriate' things, because, after all, everything's rated.
Look, we've given those fascist 'think of the children' asshats every damn thing they wanted, and, magically, they always want more. It is trivial to filter content from children at this point, via broadcast or cable. We should be reducing such general restrictions, not adding to them, because we've added specific abilities to filter to end users. There's no logical reason we should be extending restrictions them to cable.
The one conclusion is that they wish to keep such content from adults.
You know what? Media companies need to start labeling everything TV-MA. Everything. All channels, all shows, are now listed as bad as possible. You can either live and operate as an adult when interacting with the TV, or you can not ever watch anything ever again. Your choice.
We tired, God knows we tried, but you fascist assholes either mindbogglingly stupid you can't avoid the carefully labelled content we've made, or deliberately don't want to. We're just going to have to draw the line in the sand, and label everything as 'hardcore porn' so you will shut the hell up. If people want cable, or, hell, wish to purchase a TV, they get handed a form that they have to flip past ten pages of porn to sign, and certify that they consent to have the filthiest things possible beamed directly into their and their children's brain.
Of course, TV would remain the same, with different shows aimed at different audiences, but we'd have a lot less assholes whining about it, because there would be huge clear warnings that 'The following show contains every bad thing on earth. Do not watch it under any circumstances.'
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
With the V-chip in every TV sold, I think it's time to end FCC restrictions on over-the-air television, not the other way around.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Sex in the City is garbage for dead minds.
What is the rationale for the Free Speech infringement here?
With broadcast regs, it is reasoned that the airwaves are a limited public resource. Thus, the public supposedly has a right to regulate content broadcast over it.
But cable is neither a limited, nor a public resource. And I don't gather that satellite is either. So how does the Congress get around the First Amendment and regulate their content?
Is this unconstitutional or what?
Who gets to decide what is indecent? Me? I doubt it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Would all those great shows like the Sopranos, Sex in the city, Deadwood, etc ever been possible had HBO been worrying whether or not they're hurting all of those beautiful minds in the heartland?
... is when these little pricks work together!"
Certainly not, they'd have been too risky.
Matter of fact, this is just another example of a bunch of lawyers (i.e., Congress) creating a lot of makework. That's all this is: yet another Congressional subsidy to the corporate attorney crowd, as if Sarbanes-Oxley and intellectual property (hah!) weren't enough. We're at the point where no company can take a breath (much less create something worthwhile) without having to consult some lawyer and have him pass on the idea. Which he won't, with laws like this on the books, because if he did, he wouldn't be doing his job.
Regarding "decency" laws: what is it about certain people that they feel the need to force their pattern for living upon everyone else? I just want to grab one of these idiots by the throat, shake him a few times, and point out that I'M NOT OFFENDED BY A FEW BAD WORDS, YOU STUPID LITTLE PRICK, I PAY THE DAMN CABLE BILL NOT YOU, AND WORRYING ABOUT WHAT ME OR MY FUCKING KIDS SEE ON THE GODDAMN TELEVISION IS ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NONE OF YOUR GODDAMNED BUSINESS!
"Decency" laws my ass. What we need are laws that make Congress behave decently. I might go for that. But they'd fuck that up too, it's the nature of that particular collective beast. It really is twisted that some of the most amoral individuals in our society are the ones trying to define what is acceptable and "decent" (whatever that actually means) for the rest of us. Still, they do say that hierarchies are like septic tanks: the really big chunks always rise to the top.
And I'm sorry if any of you found this post to be "indecent" but sometimes Congress just torques me into a fucking pretzel. As Lewis Black says, "The only thing STUPIDER than a Republican or a Democrat
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have never been impressed by my Engineering friends' patience for the disturbing capacity of the human organism to frustrate expected error tolerances; they tend to expect things to work in regular and predictable ways (with easily twiddlable control values). Individual humans are bad enough in this respect, but in aggregate, human beings are frustratingly difficult to predict in their behaviors and constructing systems for channeling and mediating those behaviors have unexpected and often catastrophic failures.
When you stop and think about it, law and legislation is very much like engineering; just with none of the convenient physical laws and thresholds to depend upon when designing the machines for operation. The engineering mindset, however, tends to value efficiency above all other qualities, and efficiency is not the primary goal of legislation; there are other things of value to be preserved in human-government interactions that would undoubtedly be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.
I do agree that this particular legislation sucks lots, though. Doesn't take an enginner to figure that out.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Cable rates have increased at 6 times the rate of inflation this decade, it's insane.
I want cable, but I don't want to scroll through 200 channels of crap I'll never watch (MTV, VH1, Lifetime, Oxygen, the fucking Golf channel... these are my opinions, keep your flames).
I do want to watch the Hitlery, er--I mean, History Channel (when it's not about WWII), History International, the Discovery networks, Comedy Central, and a few select others. Give me my 20 or so channels that I actually want at $1 each, and I'll be happy.
I'm still subscribing, and there are still commercials, so the only people who lose from censoring cable are the majority of people who aren't offended by OMGBOOBIEZ!!!111one on the National Geographic channel. If you don't like it, turn back to the 700 Club.
The premium channels (HBO, Showtime, Skinemax, etc) are the ones they likely want to censor, and these are the ones you have to effectively subscribe to twice.
The FCC is not my kid's parent, I am. Don't impugn my ability to perform my parental duties, you pseudo-family-values fascists. I suspect that they want to do this to increase DVD sales.
A major reason why I pay for premium channels is so I can watch things like Penn & Teller Bullshit! and Orgazmo. If pay cable has to be just like the three major networks of old then I'm dropping my cable like a hot rock. You hear that cable operators?; I'm not the only one who pays to see things the more public networks can't show. Lobby this one down pronto.
Even if it means imposing the indecent "indecency regulations" on cable channels?
And what if it means the channels your family likes are no longer available at all, because they were only sustainable in package form?
... and then they built the supercollider.
the point is that cable companies are given special rights above and beyond normal companies, just try to start up darjen's cable service and string some copper from the telephone poles and see what happens.
since they are given special access to public property there is a legitimate public interest in regulating their buisiness practices beyond simply preventing dishonesty and criminal activity.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Gee, you wonder why jobs are leaving America? Could it be the cost of compliance with every asinine regulation that some moron drafts?
No, jobs are leaving America because CEO's have to get their 20% annual pay increases, regardless of their actual performance.
The Code of Law and all other laws have never been about "justice": what they are is an attempt to make it possible for us to more or less live together given the fact that we fight like minks given half a chance.