[mweilgart]

The happy part of this story (not mentioned in the text) is that the "remarkable power" wielded by the MPAA, having no legal enforcement, would go away if used for arbitrary censorship.

In other words, if the MPAA found itself firmly in agreement with the goals of arbitrary censorship, the result would be a gradual dying away of its power and a gradual rise of theater chains, television stations, etc., which would happily play movies having no MPAA rating or movies with an arbitrarily restrictive rating.

The ratings must remain useful to be used.

(On the other hand, the same meddlers who want to force the MPAA to rate movies restrictively for tobacco content, would undoubtedly lobby for MPAA ratings to be legally binding on movie theaters, and for unrated movies to be illegal to play publicly. And thus are First Amendment rights gradually eroded by "well meaning" idiots....)

[forgottenpass]

Your point only holds as long as "arbitrary censorship" is tautologically defined as the types of censorship that would cause people to stop trusting the MPAA. And not only stop trusting them, but actively distrust them so much that retailers and theaters were economically incentived to not even humor the uptight busybodies that demand a censorship system.

Given that the MPAA already bumps a movie up to at least PG-13 for drug use, I wouldn't find it incongruous for them to treat cigarettes in a similar fashion.

If someone considers the Orgasmo/South Park case study, or many of the others in This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), I don't know how they would come away with an assessment that the MPAA doesn't already engage in arbitrary censorship (unless they were to agree with Matt Stone's more serious accusation that the MPAA is an economic cartel).

[M_Grey]

That does assume that such idiots were in a position to stack the SCOTUS.

Which they might be...

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Do you have any empirical evidence for this claim.