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16 

UNITED STATES v. STEVENS 

Opinion of the Court 

23, “ ‘at least some minimal value,’ ” Reply Brief 6 (quoting
H.  R.  Rep.,  at  4),  or  anything  more  than  “scant  social 
value,” Reply Brief 11, is excluded under §48(b).  But the 
text  says  “serious”  value,  and  “serious”  should  be  taken
seriously.    We  decline  the  Government’s  invitation— 
advanced  for  the  first  time  in  this  Court—to  regard  as
“serious” anything that is not “scant.”  (Or, as the dissent 
puts it, “ ‘trifling.’ ”  Post, at 6.)  As the Government recog-
nized  below,  “serious”  ordinarily  means  a  good  bit  more. 
The  District  Court’s  jury  instructions  required  value  that
is  “significant  and  of  great  import,”  App.  132,  and  the 
Government  defended  these  instructions  as  properly
relying  on  “a  commonly  accepted  meaning  of  the  word
‘serious,’ ” Brief for United States in No. 05–2497 (CA3), p. 
50. 

Quite  apart  from  the  requirement  of  “serious”  value  in 
§48(b), the excepted speech must also fall within one of the 
enumerated  categories.  Much  speech  does  not.    Most 
hunting  videos,  for  example,  are  not  obviously  instruc-
tional  in  nature,  except  in  the  sense  that  all  life  is  a  les-
son.  According to Safari Club International and the Con-
gressional  Sportsmen’s  Foundation,  many  popular  videos
“have primarily entertainment value” and are designed to
“entertai[n]  the  viewer,  marke[t]  hunting  equipment,  or 
increas[e]  the  hunting  community.”    Brief  for  Safari  Club 
International  et al.  as  Amici  Curiae  12.  The  National 
Rifle Association agrees that “much of the content of hunt-
ing media . . . is merely recreational in nature.”  NRA Brief 
28.  The Government offers no principled explanation why
these  depictions  of  hunting  or  depictions  of  Spanish  bull-
fights  would  be  inherently  valuable  while  those  of  Japa-
nese dogfights are not.  The dissent contends that hunting 
depictions  must  have  serious  value  because  hunting  has
serious value, in a way that dogfights presumably do not. 
Post, at 6–8.  But §48(b) addresses the value of the depic-
tions,  not  of  the  underlying  activity.  There  is  simply  no