If you have been in a blog-cave, you have not yet heard about the story of the blogger who recorded hate speech on KSFO and put it on his blog. 15,000 people listened, and so did corporate sponsors who pulled their ads.

The Mouse responded by threatening both Spocko, and more importantly, the service provider, and for awhile the site was offline. However, Spocko came back, and has now hit CBS News for what may well be the moment where people realize how invasively powerful the copyright industry has become. While Spocko's actions are protected under "fair use", many fair use actions, such as making archive recordings, have been effectively gutted in many cases by the DCMA. Moreover, fair use is arguable, and therefore people acting under fair use can be threatened with expensive litigation. The Mouse has a great deal of money to litigate with.

It's fairly clear that the Mouse, having made so much money by selling cartoon stories of folk heros who stand up to nefarious interests, shows that it can go the other way, by acting like Br'er Fox or the wicked stepmother. Spocko has become a folk hero having been thrown into the briar patch of notoriety, and having made his point, and then some.

Copyright law has, in addition to fair use, several more explicit exemptions to rights carved out. It is clear that we need one for excerpting for reporting, a threshold below which instead of fair uses inclusive list of criteria which does not exclude state action, there is an exclusive list of criteria which precludes state action. Such a more narrowly tailored exemption would not deny fair use, but it would take a certain range of actions out of the area of litigatable and potentially actionable, and into the area of ordinary, day to day commerce. Call it Spocko's Law if you like.

Specifically it would allow small excerpts - having a time limit would not be a bad idea, to underline that this specific exemption is narrowly framed - for the purposes of reporting or defending assertions made publically. Currently, there is a damned if you do, damned if you don't quality, where if you don't excerpt, you can be sued for defamation, and if you do, for copyright violation. Since there is no incremental cost in sending out threatening letters, this suits the Mouse fine. It is less good for the public discourse.

The other question that comes up is, with "The Path to 9/11" and KSFO, is why is the Mouse in bed with racists and conspiracy theorists?