Definitional balancing

Methodology for the United States Supreme Court to use in “defining which forms of speech are to be regarded as ‘speech’ within the meaning of the First Amendment”, propounded by Melville B. Nimmer in The Right to Speak Times to Time: First Amendment Theory Applied to Libel and Misapplied to Privacy, 56 CAL. L. REV. 935, 942 & n. 24 (1968). It seeks to strike a balance between competing speech and regulatory interests, avoiding the problems of (on the one hand) the absolutist approach (all speech must be free) and ad hoc balancing of those interests, and is therefore of considerable interest to copyright lawyers - in the United States, at least.