"The line between the informing and the entertaining is too elusive for the protection of that basic right [a free press]. Everyone is familiar with instances of propaganda through fiction. What is one man's amusement, teaches another's doctrine."

—statute prohibiting distribution of magazine principally "made up of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime" was unconstitutionally vague because the standard of guilt was impossible to define

The Supreme Court went on to make clear that the First Amendment is not limited to traditionally refined works that one might find in a museum or library, but that "[c] rudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny."

Indeed, the Supreme Court in connection with the regulation of magazines has stated that violent expression is "as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the. best of literature."

`The standards of certainty in statutes punishing for offenses is (sic) higher than in those depending primarily upon civil sanction for enforcement....

Enactments with civil rather than criminal penalties are often granted greater tolerance because the consequences of imprecision are qualitatively less severe

Hicks also argues that "[m] en of common intelligence cannot be required to guess at the meaning of [an] enactment."

The constitutional requirement of definiteness applies more strictly to penal laws than to statutes that exact civil penalties.

Indeed, as thoughtful judges have long recognized, unconstitutional indefinites "is itself an indefinite concept."

[CITATION] Brown v. ENTERTAINMENT MERCHANTS ASSN.