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Comment by ryanstewart | Hacker News Reader

Well I'd say this issue was an example of where the GOP could burnish their free market ideals on an issue that people outside of their normal demographic care about.

Clearly the GOP is doing some soul searching and this one issue wasn't going to make a gigantic impact, but it could have been one piece of a bigger strategy. As they (potentially) move away from traditionally social conservative issues and start focusing more and more on personal liberty and the free market, this could have been a good contrast to Democrats as part of a broader picture.

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Plenty of free market people believe that people and companies have a right to control the products of their own labor or of labor that they financed.

The GOP is no more likely to move away from being the party of social conservatism than the Democrats are to move away from being the party of public school teachers.

(Fair warning: I'm a casual browser of libertarian policy positions, but I am most definitely not a libertarian. My libertarian friends would call me a liberal statist.)

I think that can be taken further. I may well be wrong, but I don't find it hard to imagine many free market people would say "Why should a person's work EVER pass into the public domain?!"

Yes, among small-L libertarians there are very strong schools of thought for both stronger and weaker IP protection. And each thinks the other is nuts.

Thanks for confirming that. It seemed like something you'd hear. And given their views, I get how they'd come to that.

There are a lot of people who are quite hostile to the idea of any sort of public domain, believing commons to be inefficient. Many people want to take things like water resources out of the public domain and let the free markets appropriately allocate them.

Both fair points. And I'd argue that's a great philosophical discussion for the libertarian parts of the GOP to have.

In this case it seems like the discussion was stifled because of the big money behind copyright questions.

So regardless it seems a shame that the GOP couldn't use this memo as a starting point for a good debate around policies and where the party stood/stands.

Andrew Joseph Galambos legally changed his name (from Joseph Andrew Galambos) as to avoid infringing his identically-named father’s rights to the name, and dropped a nickel in a box every time he said "liberty", as a royalty to the descendants of Thomas Paine, the alleged inventor of the word.

(Source: Against Intellectual Property, by Stephan Kinsella)

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