If you want to see where a candidate stands on one of the most important issues of the day, an umbrella-type issue under which all the others may be said to fall—Iraq, healthcare, the environment, campaign reform—ask them what they have done and what they plan to do about the copyright law fashioned over the past decade in service of corporations and at the expense the public good. So many smart people have made compelling arguments about the way these laws hobble the flow of ideas and mock the key technological developments of our so-called information age, that any candidate who won’t come out in favor of rewriting them is tipping us all off that they are and will be a tool of corporations and that they will not act in our benefit.

John McCain, who is becoming perhaps the strongest advocate of copyright reform, is using Fox Network debate footage in campaign ads, raising the ire of Fox execs, who are now going after McCain with the usual battery of attorneys flush with all the confidence that comes with the super powers granted them by today’s corporate-constructed copyright law.

According to copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, McCain, like any of today’s mythic horde of “pimply faced music-file-sharing criminals,” has no legal ground to stand on. The Senator and presidential candidate’s pleas will be struck down by the courts and he will be ordered to pay “damages” to Fox for using footage from a debate that he participated in voluntarily and that was organized theoretically to promote democracy. It is the latest chapter in the wack history of a legal code that makes no bones of blocking freedom of speech in our freedom-obsessed society.

The McCain ad, as you can see for now, before it’s taken down by Fox, is aimed at Hillary Clinton, who incidentally and revealingly refuses to say a word about copyright regulation. Lessig points out that it was Hillary’s husband who was in office at the beginning of the internet era when much of the copyright finagling was engineered by corporations such as Disney, paving the way for the abuses brought off with glee today by global monopoly constructs such as the RIAA.

Lessig called out the Democratic candidates in a speech in May in New York and sent an open letter to the candidates of both parties asking them to address copyright regulation. Hillary never responded.