Thought this discussion on Fair Use and what people have to do to exercse that right was interesting, as it draws similar parallels to what many must go through to exercise their 2A and Art. 1, Sec. 21 rights. Emphasis by me:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008...has-most-money

Is Fair Use decided by who has the most money?
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, The Industry Standard
10.07.2008

Anthony Falzone, Executive Director of the Fair Use Project, was involved in the defense of the suit brought by Yoko Ono and EMI Records over the use of John Lennon's Imagine in Ben Stein's documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. As a result of his involvement in the suit, defending the filmmakers pro bono alongside the producers' lawyers, he came to a frightening conclusion: fair use is guaranteed under the Constitution, but it's becoming too expensive to actually take advantage of what is supposed to be a guaranteed right.

As Falzone points out, the film's producers were able to take advantage of the Documentary Film Program, which provides Media Professional Insurance and the availability of legal vetting of fair use of media before a movie is released. Even with that vetting, however, Ono and EMI sued over a 15-second section of a song used in a documentary, and the DVD version of the film was released without that section because of the pending lawsuit. If a film with Hollywood producers has trouble using media clips, what hope does an average citizen have of using something without worrying about huge legal expenses that could result?

This year has seen an alarming amount of debate over what constitutes fair use, from the AP's issues with The Drudge Retort to concerns about erosion of fair use as part of the proposed ACTA legislation. Legal protection is nothing but words on paper if the de facto law is that whoever has the most money decides what constitutes fair use.
And, the following is the article from the Stanford Law School, who helped out with the case:

Expelled Is Absolved
by Anthony Falzone, posted on October 6, 2008 - 8:07pm.

After both the state and federal courts rejected the attempts of Yoko Ono Lennon and EMI Records to enjoin the showing of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed on the ground it used a 15-second fragment of John Lennon's Imagine, all of the plaintiffs in both cases have now withdrawn their claims and dismissed their cases.

This is the right result to be sure. There should never have been any doubt the filmmakers who were sued here had every right to use a short segment of a song for the purpose of criticizing it and the views it represents. But the right result came far too late. The mere pendency of these cases caused the film's DVD distributor to shy away from releasing the full film -- the version that includes the Imagine segment. So the film goes out on DVD on October 21 in censored form, illustrating the damage that even an unproved and unsupported infringement claim can do.

At the same time, the result here -- great but imperfect -- is a fantastic lesson in how we might start to solve the fair use dilemma. We launched the Documentary Film Program with Media Professional Insurance and Michael Donaldson to help solve a critical problem: fair use rights are expensive to use because they require lots of lawyer time. Media Pro took the visionary step of insuring fair use risks. We and Donaldson agreed to mediate these risks by vetting the fair use issues ahead of time. (We do it for free; Donaldson has to make a living.) Donaldson reviewed Expelled, and Media Pro insured it. When its producers got sued, we agreed to defend it pro bono, alongside the producers' regular counsel at the Locke Lord firm. Together we won, kept the cost to Media Pro minimal, and thus demonstrated that the fair use problem can be solved, in many (but perhaps not all) cases by teamwork like this.

I'm proud to have been a part of it.