Anthony writes:

...

Why defend free speech if it's just a couple words some guys made up and wrote down on paper? The very nature of the legal system in the United States of America is based upon natural rights. "We hold these truths to be self-evident". Self-evident. Not created by congressmen.

In an effort to add some light rather than heat, let me say this in response:

It is a common mistake to confuse the Declaration of Independence (quoted above), which uses the rhetoric of natural rights, with the U.S. Constitution, which does not use that rhetoric. The first was published in 1776; the second was completed in 1787, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. The reason for the addition of the Bill of Rights was precisely that the Framers and the voters came to believe that no concept of "natural rights" was adequate to guarantee protection of things like "the freedom of speech," even under a government of limited and specified powers.

The Declaration of Independence is not part of "the legal system in the United States of America." It's a rhetorical document, not a legal one.

Of course, any historically informed reading of the Declaration of Independence can see that its natural-rights rhetoric can be understand in ways that are consistent with the explicit creation of rights in the Constitution. To wit, we may be said to have the general natural right to create our own specific Constitutionally and legally guaranteed rights. (This is more or less what the Declaration of Independence says. But it's quite clear that the Declaration of Independence, standing alone, has no legal force.)

It should be noted that the Constitution does not even grant rights to Authors and Inventors. What it does, expressly, is give Congress the power to create such rights (without specifying what those rights might be). It would clearly be constitutional for Congress to change rights in copyright, or even remove them. Such a change is not the sort of thing that can be understood by any natural-rights theory of copyright.

--Mike