ABSTRACT
The pornography industry relies on the right of free speech that is protected under the First Amendment, but the government has tried to curb this right in the context of these businesses. During the 1980s several firms began offering, for a fee, sexually oriented, prerecorded telephone messages popularly known as "dial-a-porn." The additional amendment extended the penalties of fines and up to two years' imprisonment to include proprietors and others "in control" of the firm offering the sexual messages as well as the employees responding to calls or involved in making and transmitting the prerecorded messages. In Sable Communications of California, Inc. V. Federal Communications Commission, 492 US 115, the US Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Byron R. White, held that provisions of the amendments that prohibited obscene communication, as defined in Miller v. California, 413 US 15, were constitutional.
