Do action safe nits count?

In the early Ally McBeal episode "One Hundred Tears Away" (oh please, cry me a river), Ally is arrested for tripping up a woman at the supermarket in an argument over potato chips. The woman supposedly does not like ridged potato chips, yet she puts the last remaining can of Pringles back on the shelf. Ally takes the Pringles and the other woman then grabs it from her, claiming that she still intended to buy them despite putting them down on the shelf.

I watched this episode when it first aired, but it wasn't until watching it yesterday that I noticed that there's another can of Pringles visible in the shot. Just look at the right edge of your screen. This did not get past the staff at IMDb, for they also noticed this and listed it under "Goofs" for that episode.

But that's not the reason I hesitated to make a blog post about it. The thing is that the second can of Pringles falls outside of what editors of a decade ago call the "action safe." There is also an area called the "title safe," within which you must place your titles, actor credits, etc., if you want everyone who views you video to see them. The action safe area is slightly larger than the title safe area, but a similar principle applies: don't put action outside the action safe if you want all viewers to see it. For example, if you have someone waiting in ambush on the left edge of the frame, to the left of the action safe, his popping out will be as much a surprise to the viewer as it is to the ambushed character on the screen.

At least that's the case for viewers using old analog 4:3 televisions. The screens on those televisions were almost never straight-edge rectangles, but rather rounded edge rectangles. Nor was the exact shape of the rounded rectangle standardized, though generally TVs from the 1950s clipped a lot more of the edges than TVs from the 1990s.

Now, when I watch a DVD of a show like Ally McBeal on my 16:9 digital TV, with black bars on the left and right of the frame, I will see things that the show's editors probably thought no one else but them would ever see. For that reason I'm not sure that nits for things outside the action safe, or even the title safe for that matter, ought to count or not.

What do you think? Do such nits count? And where do they fit on the hierarchy of nits? Above or below freeze-frame or zoom nits?