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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, whic

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.

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.