YESTERDAY I CRITICIZED THE REPUBLICAN STUDY COMMITTEE for withdrawing its paper on intellectual property. That brought this email from the RSC’s Brian Straessle:

Hey Glenn, just responded to your Tweet but also wanted to email with a longer explanation of why that copyright Policy Brief was removed from our website.

On issues where there are several different perspectives among our members, our Policy Briefs should reflect that. This Policy Brief presented one view among conservatives on U.S. copyright law. Due to an oversight in our review process, it did not account for the full range of perspectives among our members. It was removed from the website to address that concern.

I know some want to point fingers elsewhere, but the simple fact is that we screwed up, we admitted it, and we hope people will now use this opportunity to engage in polite and serious discussion of copyright law.

Feel free to post in full.

Done! But I think that the rain-in-the-desert reaction to this paper should provide guidance on how things ought to go in the future.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Cumpton writes: “So now we’re supposed to engage in discussion about a policy brief that was taken down? Is a new policy brief going up I wonder?” I think the discussion he refers to is internal. But the paper is still available here.