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I have lately been fond of the idea of not abolishing, copyright, but setting a copyright tax that increases heavily over time. Say, first two years tax-free, t
by beefield 9y ago
I have lately been fond of the idea of not abolishing, copyright, but setting a copyright tax that increases heavily over time. Say, first two years tax-free, third year USD 1000 and doubling after that each year. Once copyright holder fails to pay the tax, the copyrighted work becomes automatically public domain. Orphan works would be solved as well with this.
(Admittably, I have not thought the international problems that this might cause)
- V-2 9y ago> Once copyright holder fails to pay the tax, the copyrighted work becomes automatically public domain ...or it gets bought by some more powerful entity - capable of paying the tax - shortly before this happens. Leading to concentration of copyrights in the hands of big corporations, to an extent even larger than under current system.
- beefield 9y agoDid you calculate how much tax would be payable after e.g. 20 years? I guess it would be a very rare piece of work that anyone would be willing to pay the tax for longer than 20 years.
- dingo_bat 9y agoThe "doubling every year" part takes care of that pretty effectively IMO.
- pwg 9y ago> or it gets bought by some more powerful entity - capable of paying the tax The "doubling after that each year" provision of the original comment neatly takes care of that. After a relatively small number of doublings the size of the tax for the single item would be larger than the current US national debt. The 'math' term for this is "exponential growth".
- stale2002 9y agoAnd that entity would be paying massive amounts of money in taxes, which society could use for other things. Sounds great to me.
- beojan 9y agoThat makes it useless for copyleft. My suggestion is that if the copyright holder fails to pay the tax, it is automatically considered to be licensed under the latest version of the GPL.
- beefield 9y agoWell, let's grant an exception to GPL type licenses, then?
- dingo_bat 9y agoWhy GPL though? Why not MIT or Apache? Those are better IMO.
- icebraining 9y agoI think the question is whether one would have to pay to keep one's own works under the GPL.
- benchaney 9y agoNot under this proposal, as long as you continuously updated the software. If you never payed the tax, the version from two years ago would lapse into public domain, but any maintained versions would continue to be copyrighted (or at least contained copyrighted elements) as long as effort was expended to maintain them. In theory there is nothing preventing this from happening with GPL software now, except that the length of time for something to go into public domain is so long. Edit: In some ways this is actually an improvement over the status quo. It solves the problem where software can't be relicensed because no one can track down all the authors. You only have to track down the authors who have been active in the last two years.
- beojan 9y agoThat still ends up with a lot of copylefted code ending up losing the copyleft protection. E.g. someone could build their proprietary product on top of a two year old Linux kernel, and not have to adhere to the GPL. > In some ways this is actually an improvement over the status quo. It solves the problem where software can't be relicensed because no one can track down all the authors. I wouldn't really call that an improvement. There's no longer even a point in relicensing code, given that the license only matters for code less than two years old.
- saagarjha 9y agoThis just allows for large companies to have a 20+ year copyright while limiting copyright for smaller creators to a maximum of a year or so.
- beefield 9y agoHow many 20 year old pieces of copyrighted work you know where the copyright holder would be willing to pay 130 Million USD in taxes to keep the copyright one more year? I can't think of a single one.
- dingo_bat 9y agoHow do you determine the unit of work though? Every C file counts as an independent work? Or a module? Or a system?
- beefield 9y agoFrankly, I have thought this more around books, music and patents than software. Obviously there should be some way to accommodate changing work, then.
- emiliobumachar 9y agoIt could be left at the discretion of the holder, with fair use being an escape valve to prevent abuse. e.g., Disney won't stich together all their movies in a year-long pseudo unit of work, because, if it did so, a two-hour clip from that work would fall under fair use.
- pwg 9y agoHow did you calculate 130 Million? An initial cost of 1000 USD, doubled every year, for 20 years is: 1000 * (2^20) (where ^ means exponentiation). Or 1,048,576,000 USD - a wee bit over 1 billion dollars for the 20th year.
- beefield 9y agoI calculated a couple of free years in the beginning as per my original post. But I may also have missed by one or two years in my no more existing spreadsheet