MUMBAI: The US Supreme Court has thrown out government sanctions against networks that aired fleeting profanity and nudity, saying regulators didn?t provide fair notice that they were taking a tougher stance.

The Supreme Court has said that the US media watchdog Federal Communications Commission didn?t give Fox and ABC fair notice before punishing them for broadcasting expletives and scenes of nudity almost a decade ago.

There were two Fox broadcasts of the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards, in which Cher and Nicole Richie both used expletives that were being broadcast by the network, and a 2003 episode of ABC?s NYPD Blue in which an exposed buttocks and the side of an exposed breast were shown to audience.

But the ruling fell short of what the broadcasters wanted. They had asked the court to invalidate the FCC?s policy as being unconstitutionally vague and to overturn decades-old rulings that subject over-the-air programming to stricter rules than cable or satellite shows.

The FCC has to tackle more than a million indecency complaints that have piled up at its doorstep since the litigation began. The FCC also must decide whether to stick with a tough standard for policing the airwaves set during the George W. Bush administration.

Broadcasters, meanwhile, had hoped for a more definitive victory that would have curtailed the government?s authority to enforce indecency rules.

MUMBAI: The US Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the FCC should still have a role in policing the country?s airwaves or whether its indecency regulations violate guarantees of free speech and due process.

With their free speech rights at issue, the major television networks are contesting the Federal Communications Commission‘s (FCC‘s) indecency policy that was upheld in a 1978 dispute over Carlin‘s Act. The networks‘ challenge involved more recent events.

The networks have argued successfully in lower courts that they exist side by side with cable channels that are beyond the FCC?s regulation. Therefore singling them out is not only nonsensical but unconstitutional.

Earlier Washington lawyer Carter G. Phillips, who represents Fox and other networks, told the court in a brief that stated, ?Today, broadcasting is neither uniquely pervasive nor uniquely accessible to children, yet broadcasters are still denied the same basic First Amendment freedoms as other media,?

Lawyers for Fox Television Stations have said that the Supreme Court should reverse its long-standing view that broadcast programming is subject to tougher rules than cable because of the scarcity of the airwaves and broadcast TV‘s pervasiveness in American life.

The networks are challenging sanctions for outbursts of those expletives and fleeting nudity before 10 pm when children are most likely to be watching. They say federal policy, which permits profanity in some situations, such as TV broadcast of the movie Saving Private Ryan, is unconstitutionally vague and violates free speech rights.