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529US3

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UNITED STATES v. PLAYBOY ENTERTAINMENT
GROUP, INC.
Opinion of the Court

When a student ﬁrst encounters our free speech jurispru-
dence, he or she might think it is inﬂuenced by the philoso-
phy that one idea is as good as any other, and that in art
and literature objective standards of style, taste, decorum,
beauty, and esthetics are deemed by the Constitution to be
indeed unattainable. Quite the opposite is
inappropriate,
true. The Constitution no more enforces a relativistic phi-
losophy or moral nihilism than it does any other point of
view. The Constitution exists precisely so that opinions and
judgments, including esthetic and moral judgments about art
and literature, can be formed, tested, and expressed. What
the Constitution says is that these judgments are for the
individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even
with the mandate or approval of a majority. Technology ex-
pands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of
this revolution if we assume the Government is best posi-
tioned to make these choices for us.

It is rare that a regulation restricting speech because of
its content will ever be permissible.
Indeed, were we to
give the Government the beneﬁt of the doubt when it at-
tempted to restrict speech, we would risk leaving regula-
tions in place that sought to shape our unique personalities
or to silence dissenting ideas. When First Amendment com-
pliance is the point to be proved, the risk of nonpersuasion—
operative in all trials—must rest with the Government, not
with the citizen.

Id., at 526.

With this burden in mind, the District Court explored
three explanations for the lack of individual blocking re-
quests.
30 F. Supp. 2d, at 719. First, individual blocking
might not be an effective alternative, due to technological or
other limitations. Second, although an adequately adver-
tised blocking provision might have been effective, § 504 as
written did not require sufﬁcient notice to make it so.
Third, the actual signal bleed problem might be far less of a
Ibid.
concern than the Government at ﬁrst had supposed.