I believe that private ownership of culture is a cost to our society, as it restricts the rest of society from being able to use, remix and adapt that work. Th

I believe that private ownership of culture is a cost to our society, as it restricts the rest of society from being able to use, remix and adapt that work. That cost grows as the work becomes more pervasive in the cultural zeitgeist. I think that owners of a work should repay a portion of this cost to society in return for a monopoly on that work. In an ideal world, I'd prefer some sort of "property tax" on intellectual property: annual percentage of IP's fair market value due as tax or it's released to public domain. However, I worry this scheme would be too vulnerable to gaming and manipulation as it's hard to determine the fair market price of a monopolized product. My proposed exponential renewal tax is somewhat flawed as 'cultural relevance' is only partially correlated with age of work. But, by increasing the cost of renewal each year, it would more closely model increased societal costs over time as private works become more pervasive and relevant in our culture. By imposing a time-correlated cost of retaining IP rights, it would incentivize IP owners to release non-profitable IP into the public domain instead of hoarding it.