@ … he and his father Ron put out a weird internet freedom “manifesto” that appeared to argue for much stronger copyright laws, and which argued that the public domain was an evil “collectivist” threat that was against basic property rights.

The giggle there is that copyrights (and patents) are market artificialities issued by the government creating an artificial shortage of goods. Hence they conflict with libertarian free market principles. The conflict between intellectual “property” rights and non-imaginary property was perhaps best summed up by Thomas Jefferson, the Father of the U.S. patent system:

Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious, then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made anyone thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and, like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

VI Writings of Thomas Jefferson at 180-181 (Washington ed.), as quoted in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 footnote 2 (1966), http://supreme.justia.com/us/383/1/case.html (italics added).

Don’t forget the orphan works problem. I advocate for a copyright’s automatic expiration one year from the date it is no longer available for sale to the public. The quid pro quo of both copyrights and patents is that the public is to receive the information in trade for a limited-term government license granting the exclusive rights to the profit from the work during that period.

If the information ceases to be available, the public is getting short-changed if the unavailability continues; it no longer has access to the information.