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Notes -
"Carving out exceptions" isn't exactly what's going on, though the difference may seem pedantic outside philosophy-of-law discussions. The idea is that the original philosophical concept of free speech at the time it was instantiated into the First Amendment wasn't a complete blanket protection of all communication, from which exceptions were carved for practical reasons--it was that several types of communication did not fall under free speech at all, and never did. So categories like slander, perjury, or obscenity occupy their own metaphorical territory beyond the borders of free speech.
You still have the same debate as to where the correct line is between protected speech, and say, slander, though the philosophical grounding may affect aspects of the debate like burdens of proof and so forth. Copyright is an interesting example, because there's a longstanding debate over whether "intellectual property" is a philosophically-grounded right prior to its legal protection--that is, is IP created by or recognized by the laws protecting it. (The various items in the Bill of Rights fall into the "recognized by" category, incidentally.)
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