• There was no 7 second delay in place when this happened - it was all live. The network did not have the SB Halftime Show on a delay.

• That said, Janet's nipple was present on screen for LESS THAN ONE SECOND - the camera on her zoomed out and spun away faster than you can say "Evil Dead". Why is no one mentioning this fact (which makes this incident barely even trivial)? I was watching the show, and I have a DVR, and even with me rewinding and pausing the live TV, I could barely make out anything there. You had to have had your eyes glued to the TV set at that exact second to even know what was going on. At my SB party (about 10 of us), I was the only one who thought something even remotely odd was happening.

Good riddance to this truly arbitrary and capricious FCC fine.

We didn't have DVR then. I Had to call people ot confirm what I saw. And only half of them thought they saw what I thought I saw.

As far as I could tell, this was the only thing the FCC enforced anymore. After seeing the South Park movie on Comedy Central unedited at about 8pm one night, I knew it was basically dead.

This only caused such a stir, since its the most viewed show in the world, and it just makes the FCC look bad on a global scale.

After this, though, you'll start seeing more nudity on American TV now, mark my word.

You can now say "fuck" and "shit" on basic cable now, and not only 5 years ago you couldn't even say "dick".

Janet's nipple was the tipping point, expect more.

The FCC has no jurisdiction over non-broadcast TV - that includes basic cable. (Although there are those who would love more govmmint regulation there.) What, you may ask, is the current regulating body of basic cable? The answer is the advertisers. They basically vote with their money if they want to advertise in a show which would otherwise not be showable on network TV. So if Comedy Central gets advertisers who will pay for spots in an uncut R-rated movie, on it goes.

... and then explain to me how the sight of them is harmful to children.

I did not know that. Well advertisers will pretty much support anything nowadays on cable.

I foresee an overhaul of the FCC regulations here pretty soon. Advertisers are missing out on too many financial opportunities by restricting broadcast tv.

That the NFL and the Super Bowl in particular is an entirely staged affair and that its connection to a real 'sports' is completely a made up thing.

I thought it was covered; I never saw an actual nipple. And yeah, this was one of the more ridiculous "controversies" we've seen in a while.

You couldn't see the thing being complained about. Yeah, I imagine civilization was sooooo close to collapsing.

There's something twisted about a society that is more easily offended by naked bodies than by naked violence.

This is generally good news, but is far from the last word from the courts on this issue, even if the FCC doesn't appeal this result. The Supreme Court has already agreed to hear the Commission's appeal of their earlier smackdown by the appellate court in a case dealing with fleeting expletives rather than fleeting boob. That appeal marks the first time the Supremes have agreed to tackle the issue since the recently oft-commented on Pacifica case in 1978 (which dealt with a broadcast of George Carlin's "Seven Dirt Words" monologue). Following that decision sometime in 2009, we'll either have sanity...or broadcasters will be wishing for Michael Powell to return since the current FCC has demonstrated far more willingness to sanction Stuff They Don't Like, driven by chair Kevin Martin and leading Democrat Michael Copps and prodded along by certain fanatical Congress critters feeding raw meat to their even more fanatical base.

Really? Justin Timberlake is finally a free man?

She had a covering that probably would have passed muster as "clothing" according to adult-entertainment laws in some states.

.......ever since the day this incident affected the course of American history forever. It was a horrible, shocking display, that I tragically missed, while reaching for a Dorito.......... I'll never recover.

Everybody forgets that the group Moveon was not allowed to run an advertisement critisizing the administrations deficit spending during that broadcast. They also refused to allow PETA to show an ad.

This of course points to overall control of message which even the NFL apparently is part of. Here I was thinking you could be a democrat like football. The whole boob controversy blew the whole story of the ad off the air - thanks to MTV, who sponsored and planned the halftime show that year for the first time.

Obvious manipulation and in the end it was apparently free, penalties postponed til the issue of NFL censoring was lost in the clamor and the FCC meandered its way to letting the corporation keep it's money.

here is the link http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0116-01.htm

Now a Super Bowl halftime show featuring penis puppets I would actually watch.

3-6 Mafia got an Oscar BEFORE Martin Scorsese got an Oscar. It's not like anyone's breaking down the doors to make anything worth watching or listening to.

It's not even a real boob anyway.

were the ones demanding it in this case! The governments not good enough to protect your water supply from polluters but it's somehow good enough to protect your children from a half second nipple shot?

Anybody who's ever been in a television control room during a live broadcast knows it's impossible for CBS to have cut away cleanly from the shot of Jackson's breast in what we now know was exactly nine-sixteenths of a second without being prepared in advance.

And the offensive thing about this stunt is not the naked breast, which wasn't really naked anyway. It's the simulation of a sexual assault.

February 1, 2004 was the day that changed everything. I stumbled, stunned, into the street; I saw grown men weeping. Where were our leaders when we needed them most?