Did they really have any opportunity here? Silicon Valley also (reasonably!) requires support for gay marriage, believes in and fears anthropogenic global warming, is basically pro-choice, and has dovish foreign policy beliefs. Demographically, Silicon Valley is largely college educated and is more ethnically diverse than suburban America.
I know hearing this upsets HN, and lots of smart people think I'm completely batshit when I say this, but copyright reform is a fringe issue. There are probably more people who vote for the gold standard, or to ban mosques.
I think that they did have an opportunity here. Are there going to be a lot of Democrats in Silicon Valley for the foreseeable future? Yes. But there are also a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are libertarian, want small government, low taxes, less regulation, etc.
Political parties are not full of people who agree with the party on everything. They are full of of people who agree with more of one agenda than another. There are a lot of people who the Republicans could attract. And even if the demographics are not that big for this group, some of the people who they would pull in are exactly who they need to make an answer to Narwhale.
As for how big this issue is likely to be nationally, the Pirate Party in multiple countries regularly polls over 0.5%, and has thrown up several election results where their candidate scored in the 6-9% range. No, that's not enough to win an election. But that is enough to be a significant wedge issue in a tight election. (And US elections are all tight these days.)
This is a hard pill for people to swallow, but I think even among the larger engineering crowd copyright reform is a fringe issue. Remember, software companies were hard-chargers in the push for DRM, TPM (remember that?), etc. Copy protection in games, software dongles for high-end software, etc. Most traditional software engineers still strongly support copyright--it's the thing that keeps people from "stealing" their products.
It's a subset of the software engineering crowd, the one that works in web space for companies that make money off other peoples' creative work, that sees copyright reform as an important problem. And I think there is a total lack of acknowledgement among this crowd that maybe there are more stakeholders in this issue than just themselves or the big evil music/movie companies. I think there is also a denial of how much certain web companies really depend on other peoples' copyrighted material for their viability (cough Youtube cough).
5 years ago, it was. Today, after the SOPA/PIPA thing, it's much more mainstream. People who 5 years ago thought I was weird for talking about Lessig, today are familiar with Sonny Bono and feel strongly against copyright extensions.
I know there are smart people who believe SOPA/PIPA was a game-changer that pushed copyright reform into the mainstream, but I'm not convinced. Both things can be true: that the PR cost of pushing through something like SOPA outweighs the marginal benefits (political and economical) of the bill, and that radically disrupting the content industry is not generally a winning issue for either party.
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.
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?!"
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.
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.
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)
It depends on your personal priorities and values. The issues you are pointing to are mostly social factors. If it comes down to the voting booth I am quite certain that issues like gay marriage or choice are far less dominant than supporting competition and less government intervention, that (a long time in the past) have been core issues to the GOP.
Even I, being very dovish on foreign policy, am beginning to question this point when I see for example the current negotiations on the ITU Internet regulations. All this does for me is demonstrate, that values such as free speech and individual liberties are worldwide under attack, and almost entirely depending on America's strenth.
Well, if my choice of senator or congressperson helps make the difference between a land war in Iran or not, I'm going to have a hard time factoring in that legislator's support for copyright reform.
The bigger issue here though, the reason I'll go out on a limb and call copyright reform a fringe issue, is that it's supported by crazy people. For instance, in the "purported reasonableness" camp in the house, you have Darrell Issa, who has generally been a source of supported nods towards copyright reasonableness. Sounds great, right? But Issa is also a crazy hard anti-abortion crusader who has chaired panels in the house on funding for contraception and, recently, to give a new hearing to the vaccine-autism connection.
Single-issue voting is a great way to empower crazy people.
I guess the fringe issue is always looming in these situations. The SOPA discussion at least pushed it somewhat into the mainstream. But I agree with you, that many important issues are increasingly overtaken by the "crazy". I sometimes feel even myself, that trying to defending individual liberties and privacy is putting me more and more in a corner which is dominated by anyone between Richard Stallman and Alex Jones.
With a fair appreciation for the limits of my own insight on this issue and the immediate concession that reasonable people could argue about it, I respectfully disagree.
A socially moderate republican could absolutely do well on a pro-Silicon Valley platform. It benefits the GOP to have more Scott Browns in the senate than Elizabeth Warrens.
And holy caricature Batman! You should get out and meet some real-life Republicans. I get that you think they are evil baby-eaters, but they do have many thoughtful people and good ideas that Democrats could learn from.
It matters more for financial contributions and other support than for the vote. Writing off California makes sense for libertarians, but I could imagine single-issue Bay Area tech voters who are newly rich and techie and might aggressively support a candidate over this.
I personally think the President's power is limited enough, and have enough faith in the judiciary (and overall faith in the bureaucrats who make up the government) that I'd go single-issue on any of a few issues. If there were a Republican or Democrat who wanted to "fix" firearms, IP, debt, entitlements, end foreign occupations and the drug war, and/or fix the tax code, I'd consider working for him for a campaign, donating the max to superpacs, etc., if I thought he could win. I'd be ok if that candidate was against gay rights (since the courts would protect the gains so far, and could extend them), was short or ugly, etc.
Not for New Zealand it isn't. We get no say in US politics yet the transpacific partnership is poised to force copyright issues to the benefit of US corporations. Even without the TPP we have the Dotcom saga, further weakening our laws won't help NZ.
> believes in and fears anthropogenic global warming
It's a bit frustrating to see the term 'believe' used with respect to global warming. Global warming has been described using sound science and 99% of climate scientists agree on this. Using belief suggests that it's a matter of faith like choosing to be catholic.
Honestly, choosing to be Catholic (as opposed to growing up Catholic) is not that different. You're just picking a set of claims with a weaker factual base than that of global warming.
There is, or at least ought to be, a bit of wiggle room where reasonable people disagree on global warming policy. I'm convinced that the world has gotten warmer in the last 100 years, and that there is a scientifically plausible model that shows that human activities are a major factor in that.
But the case for the urgency of addressing global warming versus other world problems or the case for addressing global warming through carbon reduction are less well-made.
According to the exit polls, voters aged 18–29 favored the Democratic candidate by 9 percentage points in 2004, 34 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012.
In 2016, is the Republican Presidential candidate (whoever he or she may be) going to capture a majority of this demographic? Not bloody likely. But all other factors being equal, if that candidate only loses the youth vote by 10 points, it’s that much easier to win the election as a whole.
I know hearing this upsets HN, and lots of smart people think I'm completely batshit when I say this, but copyright reform is a fringe issue. There are probably more people who vote for the gold standard, or to ban mosques.