I think Neil does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the first amendment. I don't think we do enough to protect peoples right to 'not read' however.
edit: While I clearly remember this coming up in at least one of the cases involving DeCSS where a defendant made the argument that their use of DeCSS didn't infringe copyright because they were restructuring the DVD to not play the copyright notices and ads before the copyrighted movie would play, and the MPAA's counter argument that such a change violated the movie studio's 'commercial speech' rights such that the they had produced the DVD and made certain promises to people who had paid consideration and that changing the product like that involved changing the copyrighted work as a whole. The MPAA likened it to re-arranging the order of the scenes in a movie. However searching for a citation in the usual places has yet to yield a docket id, so I withdraw the following statement :
"The whole 'commercial speech' doctrine where a company has an first amendment right to which is violated by me skipping their commercials on a DVD doesn't sit well with me at all."
Eric Goldman (blog.ericgoldman.org) did a number of roundup pieces around first amendment defenses against prosecution under the CAN-SPAM laws, and the one of the arguments set forth by the MPAA in its defense of the DMCA was that its commercial speech rights were violated by people who could use DECSS(sp?) to unencrypt their DVDs and just watch the video content without the commercials. I'll see if I can find the case id and post a link.
It is not quite the same thing, but close enough that someone might be able to make a legal leap...
There are/were services that would make edits of existing films to take out the "naughty bits" and repackage them for sale as a family friendly edit of the original film. These derivative works were not authorized by any of the original copyright holders and the censoring services lost the case (Clean Flicks of Colorado, LLC, et al. v. Steven Soderbergh, et al.) This particular case probably hinged more on how the first sale doctrine worked for digital works, but there were copyright issues raised and the judge did find that the edits were not protected by any fair use claims.
From censoring out tits to skipping commercials is a jump, and this would probably only be applicable to making and distributing copies of dvds that cut out any of the annoying warnings/ads/"coming attractions" (e.g. adding this ability to players or distributing the edits and jumps via an additional channel would not be covered) but it is a precedent to consider...
edit: While I clearly remember this coming up in at least one of the cases involving DeCSS where a defendant made the argument that their use of DeCSS didn't infringe copyright because they were restructuring the DVD to not play the copyright notices and ads before the copyrighted movie would play, and the MPAA's counter argument that such a change violated the movie studio's 'commercial speech' rights such that the they had produced the DVD and made certain promises to people who had paid consideration and that changing the product like that involved changing the copyrighted work as a whole. The MPAA likened it to re-arranging the order of the scenes in a movie. However searching for a citation in the usual places has yet to yield a docket id, so I withdraw the following statement :
"The whole 'commercial speech' doctrine where a company has an first amendment right to which is violated by me skipping their commercials on a DVD doesn't sit well with me at all."