4 ms·

Part of copyright is the right to exclude. Adding a compulsory buyout provision would make copyright so unrecognizable as to not be a copyright anymore. Imagin

Part of copyright is the right to exclude. Adding a compulsory buyout provision would make copyright so unrecognizable as to not be a copyright anymore. Imagine the Hobson's Choice you just offered small-time artists. If you don't want to work with a large publisher, you either have to overvalue your copyright to the point of being buried by ruinsome, confiscatory taxes... or, if you don't want the taxes, then a large publisher can buy you out for pennies on the dollar. What that would mean is that you would lose the legal right to write your own work anymore. Large publishers would benefit handsomely, as they'd be able to buy into a new market of hilariously undervalued work. You would turn every independent creative endeavor into the highly exploitative contracts that the average record label M&A lawyer writes on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, because these companies are already rich and powerful, they can just afford to pay the tax to overvalue their copyrights. So the end result would be a transfer of wealth from artists to publishers. Furthermore, what happens to any existing licensing agreements? What happens if Microsoft buys out Linus Torvalds or the FSF with the intent of making Linux or GNU proprietary software? Does the GPL still hold, or does the buyout override the licensing agreement? The latter is bad for obvious reasons. The former would allow the use of improper transfers and creative accounting to partially evade the taxation regime. Hold your copyright personally, exclusively license it to an LLC on very generous terms, and then undervalue the copyright on your taxes. If someone does buy you out, they can't terminate the license for at least 35 years - upon which most of the copyright's value will have already been exploited. What you seem to be asking for is a way to attack large companies for being large. The answer to your question is not to break copyright and patent law (more than it already has); but to actually enforce antitrust law, and reduce the scope and scale of copyright back to something reasonable.

kfprt 5y ago
If you set a price and multiple people are willing to pay it then it can't be exclusive.
thechao 5y ago
First, I'm restricting this to the US! I replied elsewhere, but will reply here, as well. I think there should be two "schedules": 1. A private schedule, which is tax-free which terminates at 28 years or upon any (or all?) of the authors' death, whichever is first; and, 2. A work-for-hire schedule, which begins at 0% tax, and increases by 1% every 7 years after that. A "private" copyright can be converted to a "work-for-hire" by paying past taxes. A work-for-hire may not be converted to private. First, when a copyright is "bought out", the payment is made to the Treasury — the copyright is granted by the people via the US government, that is the beneficiary of the buyout. Second, the buyout places the work into the public domain; this is not a transfer sale! Third, the copyright owner can increase the value whenever they feel like, but the valuation can never decrease. For example: the owner could value the copyright at 50 gajillion dollars; at the end of 7 years, if they can't pay the tax on the 50 gajillion dollars, the copyright lapses. For patents, I think a tax is owed when the patent is enforced in a court of law. I don't know the schedule for that.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  That's less catastrophically flawed than I thought it would be. Having a tax-free provision for privately-owned or authorially-owned copyrights fixes my main concern with this. What you're talking about with patents could be handled by just taxing licensing revenues. That would also work for creating a copyright value tax. However, I'm pretty sure we already have ways to tax the proceeds of copyright and patent licensing. Also, while "buyout to uncopyright the work" is better than "buyout to own the work for yourself", I still think there's some problems with this. Public domain doesn't just mean "everyone owns it", it also means "everyone can reuse it", and when you do that you create a new copyright on that derivative work[0]. This is part and parcel of the reason why copylefts and share-alike licensing exists. It lets you lock things open. Would Microsoft be able to buy out Linus Torvalds in order to evade the GPL on Linux? [0] This is also why nominally public domain characters like Sherlock Holmes are actually fiendishly difficult to reuse. The estate that owns the still copyrighted part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work can still sue if your reuse of the public domain character is too close to their copyrighted expression. Notably, this means your Sherlock can't be too human.
  - thechao 5y ago
    I'd argue that GPL-licensed works should remain "authorial", and that each commit generates a new derivative object and, thus, a new copyright. In that sense, the "old code" goes into the public domain in ~28 years, but the "tip of tree" remains firmly GPL'd.

kfprt 5y ago

If you set a price and multiple people are willing to pay it then it can't be exclusive.

thechao 5y ago

First, I'm restricting this to the US! I replied elsewhere, but will reply here, as well. I think there should be two "schedules": 1. A private schedule, which is tax-free which terminates at 28 years or upon any (or all?) of the authors' death, whichever is first; and, 2. A work-for-hire schedule, which begins at 0% tax, and increases by 1% every 7 years after that. A "private" copyright can be converted to a "work-for-hire" by paying past taxes. A work-for-hire may not be converted to private. First, when a copyright is "bought out", the payment is made to the Treasury — the copyright is granted by the people via the US government, that is the beneficiary of the buyout. Second, the buyout places the work into the public domain; this is not a transfer sale! Third, the copyright owner can increase the value whenever they feel like, but the valuation can never decrease. For example: the owner could value the copyright at 50 gajillion dollars; at the end of 7 years, if they can't pay the tax on the 50 gajillion dollars, the copyright lapses. For patents, I think a tax is owed when the patent is enforced in a court of law. I don't know the schedule for that.

kmeisthax 5y ago
That's less catastrophically flawed than I thought it would be. Having a tax-free provision for privately-owned or authorially-owned copyrights fixes my main concern with this. What you're talking about with patents could be handled by just taxing licensing revenues. That would also work for creating a copyright value tax. However, I'm pretty sure we already have ways to tax the proceeds of copyright and patent licensing. Also, while "buyout to uncopyright the work" is better than "buyout to own the work for yourself", I still think there's some problems with this. Public domain doesn't just mean "everyone owns it", it also means "everyone can reuse it", and when you do that you create a new copyright on that derivative work[0]. This is part and parcel of the reason why copylefts and share-alike licensing exists. It lets you lock things open. Would Microsoft be able to buy out Linus Torvalds in order to evade the GPL on Linux? [0] This is also why nominally public domain characters like Sherlock Holmes are actually fiendishly difficult to reuse. The estate that owns the still copyrighted part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work can still sue if your reuse of the public domain character is too close to their copyrighted expression. Notably, this means your Sherlock can't be too human.
- thechao 5y ago
  I'd argue that GPL-licensed works should remain "authorial", and that each commit generates a new derivative object and, thus, a new copyright. In that sense, the "old code" goes into the public domain in ~28 years, but the "tip of tree" remains firmly GPL'd.