Some intelligent people have had some interesting things to say about billboards
“Billboards, street car signs, and placards and such are in a class by themselves....Advertisements of this sort are constantly before the eyes of observers on the streets....to be seen without the exercise of choice or volition on their part. Other forms of advertising are ordinarily seen as a matter of choice on the part of the observer....The radio can be turned off, but not so the billboard....”
–Justice Brandeis in Packer v. Utah, 285 U.S. 105, 110, 52 S.Ct. 273, 274, 76 L.Ed. 643 (1932).
“We do not think the right to advertise a business is such that a businessman may appropriate common airspace and destroy common vistas.”
–Judge Bronson in Sun Oil Co. V. City of Madison Heights, 199 N.W.2d 525, 529 (Mich. 1972).
“When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable for a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.”
– Pat Brown
quoted in David Ogilvy's, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985
“Billboards are acts of aggression against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected.”
– William F. Buckley, Jr., from The Politics of Beauty, July 1966. |
