Copyright conundrum

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a Takedown Hall of Shame - a list of particularly ridiculous organizations who sued to have content taken off websites, even when the content was clearly protected as fair use.

Some of them are pretty awesome, and it's ridiculous that they were taken down, even if briefly. Like a one man a cappella greatest hits of John Williams. Or a dubbed version of White Wedding, where Billy Idol just sings about the images in the video.

But one case involves NPR, and confuses me. A political TV ad, 30 seconds long, plays clips from an NPR story for 25 seconds, and says how bad things will be if Measure 1 fails. That seems a lot less creative, and more reasonable for NPR to say, "stop stealing our material". It is political speech, which should be protected, but why not write your own damn script and make a case instead of playing the radio clip? It seems lazy and not persuasive.

But I'm not a lawyer. Being lazy and unpersuasive isn't grounds for copyright violation. Using the whole piece you copied, destroying the market for the work, whether it's fiction or not, and the character of the use are how courts decide Fair Use. And apart from the utterly untransformative (albeit political) character of this copying, it does seem to meet all the other qualifications. (Although I'm sure NPR would argue that using NPR tape in political debates damages the market for their work.)

I'm curious to see how this case turns out. The EFF thinks that NPR is dead wrong. I don't think they're totally out of line, but I wonder how a judge will rule.