Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Prior restraint
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Theater and motion pictures=== There is a long history of prior restraints on the theater; in the [[United Kingdom]] stage plays still required a license until 1968. This attitude was early transferred to motion pictures, and prior restraints were retained for films long after they had been dropped for other forms of publication: in some jurisdictions, a film had to be submitted to a [[film censor board]] in order to be approved for showing. The United States Supreme Court upheld the use of a board of censors in ''[[Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio]]'', {{ussc|236|230|1915}} by deciding that the First Amendment did not apply to motion pictures. The power of such boards was weakened when the Supreme Court later overruled itself and decided that the First Amendment does apply to motion pictures. In the case of ''[[Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson]]'', {{ussc|343|495|1952}}, the court decided that giving the power to forbid or restrict a film to a censorship board on the grounds a film was "sacrilegious" was far too damaging to the protections of the First Amendment. The "death knell" for censorship boards occurred in 1965 when the U.S. Supreme Court found the Maryland law making it a crime to exhibit a film without submitting it to the censorship board was unconstitutional. In ''[[Freedman v. Maryland]]'', {{ussc|380|51|1965}}, the state's requirement that a film be presented to the board was unconstitutional as it lacked adequate procedural safeguards. While it is not necessarily unconstitutional to require films to be submitted to a censorship board, the board has extremely limited options: a censorship board has no power to prohibit a film, and, if the law grants it that power, the law is unconstitutional. The board's only options when a film is presented to it are either to grant a license for the film or immediately go to court to enjoin its exhibition. Also, state or local censorship boards had been found to have no jurisdiction over broadcasts by television stations, even when located in the state or community where they are grounded, thus eliminating yet another reason for their existence. Both the state of [[Maryland]] and the province of [[Ontario]] retained film censor boards to a particularly late date. Maryland abandoned its board in the 1980s, and a 2004 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, reversing a previous trend in favor of the [[Ontario Film Classification Board]]'s right to insist on cuts, ruled that the province had no right to insist on cuts as a condition of release as [[Canada|Canadian]] federal [[obscenity]] laws were sufficient to deal with obscene material. In May 2005, the Ontario government ended the power of the Classification Board to insist on cuts, requiring all films with adult content that were not judged obscene to be rated "R" for adults only.{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} In many countries, legally effective [[Motion picture rating system|rating systems]] are in effect. See [[History of British Film Certificates]] for information on film restrictions in the UK.
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)