8 ms·

After an initial period of a few years 7 or 14 sounded good to the US founding fathers), Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have

After an initial period of a few years 7 or 14 sounded good to the US founding fathers), Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax. If anyone wants to put the work in the public domain, they simply have to pay the value the company declared. Disney could declare Star Wars is worth $5b, as it’s 40 years old they’d have to pay say $150m a year tax to deny the rights to the public. If they declared it to be worth $50m to save on that tax, then netflix could pay for it to go public domain.

Gwypaas 5y ago
Seems similar to a release or buyout clause often used in sports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyout_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyout_clause
samwillis 5y ago
Interesting idea, although I want to understand why do this? What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know? Also, this is a tax on unrealised gains is it not?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know? It effectively locks away cultural heritage for more than a hundred years with no tangible benefit to the society. Disney became Disney because it used works in public domains (Brothers Grimm tales) and expired copyrights (Alice in Wonderland). Current copyright laws effectively blocks anyone from using 20th century works (and some late 19th century works) for ... well, anything, really. Additionally, great swaths of culture are simply lost because of: - the fear of potential copyright violations. This affects a great number of orphan works - copyright holders doing nothing with their properties and others not being able to do anything with them. Can't find it now, but at one point Amazon carried more new books with works from the 19th century, than books with works from the 20th just because of that But even that isn't the main problem. Copyright was intended to protect the author and incentivize them to create other works. I'm eagerly awaiting Tolkien's new works in 2047 (the copyright on The Fellowship of the Ring expires in 2050).
- consp 5y ago
  If there are no gains, the option is to release it or value it as nil and let someone else do it. So it's up to the owner of the copyright and I see no real unrealized gains tax.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    Say you own the copyright on an old film you made, but are doing nothing with it (and making practically nothing) but plan to in the future (you have a plan to in say 10 years time). You are projecting that the value of the IP is something based on what you plan to do with it. So it is 100% a tax on unrealised gains. I complexly understand why some people will not be sympathetic to this.
- omgitsabird 5y ago
  I would think that long lasting copyrights stifle innovation and competition. Where is the incentive to do something new or to allow new players an ability to use works in a new way?
- vaylian 5y ago
  > What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know? Consider all those works that are in the public domain and that can be shared freely. Iconic pictures like the Mona Lisa are available to the benefit of everyone. No one owns the exclusive rights and everyone has access to this shared cultural history. There's also collateral damage with the current copyright system. A lot of lesser known works have little commercial/brand value. But they remain illegal to share. These works are at risk of becoming lost culture. And in many cases the original authors don't own the rights to release the works into the public domain at an earlier time, because they have contracts with publishers.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    To add to this, many works are simply unavailable. Works from before copyright became effectively perpetual are easily found. Works from the most recent decade or two are easily found. Anything in-between is frequently lost, with only the outliers remaining. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-missing-20th-century-books-is-even-worse-than-it-seems.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-m...
lekevicius 5y ago
This is quite similar to Harberger Tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Harberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Harberger
notahacker 5y ago
This would probably work better for the big conglomerates than the status quo. The tax would be less than the royalties they'd no longer have to pay to the actual creators, because emerging artists aren't able to afford to pay tax up front in the hope someone will eventually offer them a big advance.
laumars 5y ago
Far more complicated and harms the little players far more than the current system. Any law has to treat everyone equally otherwise it’s always going to be the Disney’s et al who win.
- iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
  i'd prefer it work like mario kart tbh, easier for the little co, harder for the big co
  - laumars 5y ago
    That’s nearly impossible to do though because the bigger the company the more resources they have to figure out loopholes and then to exploit them. And the more profitable exploiting those loopholes becomes thus the more tempting it is to act first then beg for forgiveness later. It’s not even as if anti-competition laws have much effect these days. There’s a real culture in the US of acting dishonourably and then asking for forgiveness later. And more often than not, the punishment for breaking the law is significantly less than the profit earned from those unlawful acts. So they’re incentivised to be unlawful. This is why you need clear rules that equivalent regardless of income so everyone is clear where the line is drawn; but penalties that are weighted so that rule breaking cannot be gamified.
    - wholinator2 5y ago
      I've had this (admittedly naive) idea for a while now: what if there were a way to declare fines for corporate offenses based on a percentage of the money earned from committing such an offense? This percentage could be greater than 100% to ensure it is never incentivized to break the law. The main issue is determining how much money a corporation made based on a decision. This would require statistics and analysts and the minimum possible fine should be the minimum possible fine currently imposed by law. The whole shell corporation, off shore tax haven bullshit would probably make this infeasible but is there actually anything that can stop that? I don't have any good ideas, but I know corporations should not make money off breaking the law.
mr_toad 5y ago
I don’t want to have to declare some “value” on my code and then actually pay some real money on the off-chance it might become valuable later on. I appreciate that copyright is often abused - milked - for all it’s worth. But I think your proposal goes too far. As bad as it is copyright has some uses. With copyright I can apply a GPL license and attempt to conjole others to contribute to the greater good.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  If even the author cannot value the product, even after the initial 10 years, the it should fall to public domain.
  - bruce511 5y ago
    so, to be clear here; You're suggesting that Copyleft licenses should be _public domained_ after a short period of time, or the copyright owner should pay a tax? So, let's take say the Software Freedom Foundation. They should declare a value on the GNU Tools - and if say Microsoft is prepared to pay that value then all GNU tools should be public domain - meaning they can be used in say Windows (as closed compiled binaries?) Alternatively the FSF needs to come up with some % of value to prevent MS from using their work under a closed license? I mean, copyright works both ways right? It's equally protecting those that want to commercially profit from their work, and also those that don't want it to be used in a "non freedom" way. So, assuming most GPL authors aren't swimming in cash, this would make more-or-less all GPL'd works lose their freedoms?
    - esrauch 5y ago
      You obviously disagree but it seems very reasonable to me that 20 year old FSF code should fall into the public domain including for Microsoft or MomAndPopSoftwareCo or whoever to use. Note that they still couldn't just take the current grep or vim or whatever code and use it; copyright on later revisions isn't based on the first published moment of the same project. Instead the code has tons of changes made within the past 20 years and all of those deltas will still be covered by copyright. Microsoft could only be able to take the code of grep as it was as of 2001. I actually kind of doubt they would, but if that much time has passed and something is still useful it should belong to everyone and not just one person.
throwawaycities 5y ago
> Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate. Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.
- newsclues 5y ago
  I think the suggestion is to put a buy it now price on everything so that it can be liberated.
  - kaibee 5y ago
    It also creates a disincentive for holding onto IP without using it. Its kind of an LVT on intellectual property. I like it a lot.
  - bruce511 5y ago
    Can you define "liberated" here? Because I'm thinking the effect is the opposite on things that are already liberated - I'm thinking specifically of GPL protected freedoms...
- brownbat 5y ago
  > copyright holders do in fact declare ... and pay taxes on [IP] Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there. A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system. Here's a similar (but different) idea from some IP law professors: https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge. It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
Way too unnecessarily complicated. Just reduce copyright terms to 10 years, maybe 20, and be done with it.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  It has the added benefit of generating tax revenue and incentivizing the government to protect copyrights both domestically and internationally.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Income tax generates tax revenue just as well, and the government’s incentive to protect copyrights domestically is the fact that it is the law. Internationally is a matter of politics, but I do not see a clear black and white answer for why copyright would need to be enforced internationally.
    - Beldin 5y ago
      > Income tax generates tax revenue just as well Income tax generates tax revenue. Whether it's "just as well" as other forms of taxing is debatable. In at least some countries, wealth is taxed less than labour, which increases a class distinction. Less income taxes in favour of other taxes may redress that balance. Or it may not - economists and ouija boards can give you predictions.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Sure, but I do not see the purpose of creating a special tax scheme just for copyrighted works. If you want to hit everyone with a wealth tax, then do it the same way for all assets.
- johnhowardstein 5y ago
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Don’t see why the government should be profiting so much out of that.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  Copyright only exists because the government uses its monopoly on violence to protect it. Why should it not get a decent cut of the pie after a decade or so? The average property tax is about 1%, so why should copyright be treated as something special? Especially, if the rent is collected by a third party that purchased the rights, their relationship to the creation of the underlying asset is no different to a landlord. I'd dispense with this self-valuation business though and just charge a 1% tax on net present value of the asset. If the copyright holder releases their claim early, then they'll get a tax refund for previous payments at the recalculated net present value.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    "Why should it not get a decent cut of the pie after a decade or so?" well i guess it depends on if you view the government as a profit seeking entity trying to maximally price its IP protection product, or if you view it as societal infrastructure.
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      Society works when people feel better off within than without, when that's not true, then people stop respecting laws and generally act asocial. Copyright holders get an excellent deal by living in a society that allows them to collect rents that can add up into the millions of even billions. But how about the work-a-day folks? What's in it for them? An abstract idea that allowing the descendants of creators to collect economic rents for generations after their death, might result in a greater throughput in creative works... somehow. No, for society to work, then rent seeking must be reigned in. A copyright wealth tax would still allow rights holders to become fabulously wealthy, but they'd have to give something back in return. Something more than normal income tax, because of the rent seeking nature of their enterprise.
AuthorizedCust 5y ago
Why do so many proposals to increase liberties come with a new tax? The government isn’t some beast we have to appease. It’s us! If we want to reform copyright, we don’t need to bribe ourselves with a new tax.
- esrauch 5y ago
  Taxes (and tax deductions) are generally one of the best ways to align incentives. If it's a binary condition then you have tons of derelict content that should really be public domain, but because of the big ticket well-maintained Disney content the laws are written to be "reasonable" for that content and it ends up unnecessary locking up all of the other content from the 1970s
nsgi 5y ago
How would you value the product of a startup, or some open source software that doesn't make any money but the creator wants to use a copyleft license for? Also, how would this work internationally? Would you have to pay a proportion of the value to the US government even if the US is a small market for you?
- izacus 5y ago
  What kind of "startup product" is 15 or 20 years old and has been unchanged since then? That would be older than Google for example.
  - bhelkey 5y ago
    > That would be older than Google for example. Google was incorporated in 1998 [1]. To be fair, the patent for PageRank has since expired [2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150623193037/https://www.google.com/about/company/history/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150623193037/https://www.googl... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999 https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999
- tlbsofware 5y ago
  My guess would be that after the initial period of no taxes if the company wasn’t able to turn a profit on the patent then they would have to either sell the patent to avoid taxes or list it as a value that they would manage to be able to pay taxes and start raising money, might help with patent/copyright squatting
snarf21 5y ago
We should just drop to 50 years. Most people have a working career of 50 years. Having 50 years to earn off your creation seems fair to everyone.
- bacchusracine 5y ago
  >Having 50 years to earn off your creation seems fair to everyone. Everyone? Hold on there a moment, Jack. I'm a copyright minimalist. Seven years with one renewal for a total of fourteen years seems much more fair to me considering all the years we've already had of continually delayed releases into the public domain. We the people have paid to enforce those years of copyright without the corresponding payoff at the end of the term release to the public. There's nothing fair about that situation and it needs to be addressed.
quags 5y ago
Ideally, in a perfect world this makes sense but will not work in reality. This just gives a way for any larger player to easily get something in the public domain from a smaller player with less resources. The tax concept is a good concept, maybe like how we have large banks under more scrutiny over a certain level - but this may lead to small IP companies that just hold ip in order to get below the threshold. Star Wars LLC licensing to disney to be under whatever threshold is designed. Copyright in reality should protect the smaller players from the bigger players, a 30 year time frame for an author to profit before the public domain, so a company can not horde IP makes more sense.
efsavage 5y ago
I've long advocated something generally like this, for patents and other IP as well. I would propose a longer initial term (~30-50 years) since the nature and value of IP has changed significantly since the 1700s. I would also put an upper limit on it, since the most valuable IP is now held by immortal corporations. The hard part for copyright is tracking what has been renewed and what has not, without some kind of registration system, which I don't think we want to add. Without this, it would make it very difficult to know if the work you intend to use/copy/distribute is protected or not.
rhino369 5y ago
That is a very interesting idea. But I think you would want at least a 14 year grace period with no property tax. Another possibility is a use-it-or-lose-it scheme like that used in Trademarks. If you built a game that is now abandonware, it should be fair game for someone else to remaster it, etc.

Gwypaas 5y ago

Seems similar to a release or buyout clause often used in sports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyout_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyout_clause

samwillis 5y ago

Interesting idea, although I want to understand why do this? What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know? Also, this is a tax on unrealised gains is it not?

dmitriid 5y ago
> What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know? It effectively locks away cultural heritage for more than a hundred years with no tangible benefit to the society. Disney became Disney because it used works in public domains (Brothers Grimm tales) and expired copyrights (Alice in Wonderland). Current copyright laws effectively blocks anyone from using 20th century works (and some late 19th century works) for ... well, anything, really. Additionally, great swaths of culture are simply lost because of: - the fear of potential copyright violations. This affects a great number of orphan works - copyright holders doing nothing with their properties and others not being able to do anything with them. Can't find it now, but at one point Amazon carried more new books with works from the 19th century, than books with works from the 20th just because of that But even that isn't the main problem. Copyright was intended to protect the author and incentivize them to create other works. I'm eagerly awaiting Tolkien's new works in 2047 (the copyright on The Fellowship of the Ring expires in 2050).
consp 5y ago
If there are no gains, the option is to release it or value it as nil and let someone else do it. So it's up to the owner of the copyright and I see no real unrealized gains tax.
- samwillis 5y ago
  Say you own the copyright on an old film you made, but are doing nothing with it (and making practically nothing) but plan to in the future (you have a plan to in say 10 years time). You are projecting that the value of the IP is something based on what you plan to do with it. So it is 100% a tax on unrealised gains. I complexly understand why some people will not be sympathetic to this.
omgitsabird 5y ago
I would think that long lasting copyrights stifle innovation and competition. Where is the incentive to do something new or to allow new players an ability to use works in a new way?
vaylian 5y ago
> What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know? Consider all those works that are in the public domain and that can be shared freely. Iconic pictures like the Mona Lisa are available to the benefit of everyone. No one owns the exclusive rights and everyone has access to this shared cultural history. There's also collateral damage with the current copyright system. A lot of lesser known works have little commercial/brand value. But they remain illegal to share. These works are at risk of becoming lost culture. And in many cases the original authors don't own the rights to release the works into the public domain at an earlier time, because they have contracts with publishers.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  To add to this, many works are simply unavailable. Works from before copyright became effectively perpetual are easily found. Works from the most recent decade or two are easily found. Anything in-between is frequently lost, with only the outliers remaining. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-missing-20th-century-books-is-even-worse-than-it-seems.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-m...

lekevicius 5y ago

This is quite similar to Harberger Tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Harberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Harberger

notahacker 5y ago

This would probably work better for the big conglomerates than the status quo. The tax would be less than the royalties they'd no longer have to pay to the actual creators, because emerging artists aren't able to afford to pay tax up front in the hope someone will eventually offer them a big advance.

laumars 5y ago

Far more complicated and harms the little players far more than the current system. Any law has to treat everyone equally otherwise it’s always going to be the Disney’s et al who win.

iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
i'd prefer it work like mario kart tbh, easier for the little co, harder for the big co
- laumars 5y ago
  That’s nearly impossible to do though because the bigger the company the more resources they have to figure out loopholes and then to exploit them. And the more profitable exploiting those loopholes becomes thus the more tempting it is to act first then beg for forgiveness later. It’s not even as if anti-competition laws have much effect these days. There’s a real culture in the US of acting dishonourably and then asking for forgiveness later. And more often than not, the punishment for breaking the law is significantly less than the profit earned from those unlawful acts. So they’re incentivised to be unlawful. This is why you need clear rules that equivalent regardless of income so everyone is clear where the line is drawn; but penalties that are weighted so that rule breaking cannot be gamified.
  - wholinator2 5y ago
    I've had this (admittedly naive) idea for a while now: what if there were a way to declare fines for corporate offenses based on a percentage of the money earned from committing such an offense? This percentage could be greater than 100% to ensure it is never incentivized to break the law. The main issue is determining how much money a corporation made based on a decision. This would require statistics and analysts and the minimum possible fine should be the minimum possible fine currently imposed by law. The whole shell corporation, off shore tax haven bullshit would probably make this infeasible but is there actually anything that can stop that? I don't have any good ideas, but I know corporations should not make money off breaking the law.

mr_toad 5y ago

I don’t want to have to declare some “value” on my code and then actually pay some real money on the off-chance it might become valuable later on. I appreciate that copyright is often abused - milked - for all it’s worth. But I think your proposal goes too far. As bad as it is copyright has some uses. With copyright I can apply a GPL license and attempt to conjole others to contribute to the greater good.

koheripbal 5y ago
If even the author cannot value the product, even after the initial 10 years, the it should fall to public domain.
- bruce511 5y ago
  so, to be clear here; You're suggesting that Copyleft licenses should be _public domained_ after a short period of time, or the copyright owner should pay a tax? So, let's take say the Software Freedom Foundation. They should declare a value on the GNU Tools - and if say Microsoft is prepared to pay that value then all GNU tools should be public domain - meaning they can be used in say Windows (as closed compiled binaries?) Alternatively the FSF needs to come up with some % of value to prevent MS from using their work under a closed license? I mean, copyright works both ways right? It's equally protecting those that want to commercially profit from their work, and also those that don't want it to be used in a "non freedom" way. So, assuming most GPL authors aren't swimming in cash, this would make more-or-less all GPL'd works lose their freedoms?
  - esrauch 5y ago
    You obviously disagree but it seems very reasonable to me that 20 year old FSF code should fall into the public domain including for Microsoft or MomAndPopSoftwareCo or whoever to use. Note that they still couldn't just take the current grep or vim or whatever code and use it; copyright on later revisions isn't based on the first published moment of the same project. Instead the code has tons of changes made within the past 20 years and all of those deltas will still be covered by copyright. Microsoft could only be able to take the code of grep as it was as of 2001. I actually kind of doubt they would, but if that much time has passed and something is still useful it should belong to everyone and not just one person.

throwawaycities 5y ago

> Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate. Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.

newsclues 5y ago
I think the suggestion is to put a buy it now price on everything so that it can be liberated.
- kaibee 5y ago
  It also creates a disincentive for holding onto IP without using it. Its kind of an LVT on intellectual property. I like it a lot.
- bruce511 5y ago
  Can you define "liberated" here? Because I'm thinking the effect is the opposite on things that are already liberated - I'm thinking specifically of GPL protected freedoms...
brownbat 5y ago
> copyright holders do in fact declare ... and pay taxes on [IP] Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there. A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system. Here's a similar (but different) idea from some IP law professors: https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge. It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

Way too unnecessarily complicated. Just reduce copyright terms to 10 years, maybe 20, and be done with it.

koheripbal 5y ago
It has the added benefit of generating tax revenue and incentivizing the government to protect copyrights both domestically and internationally.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Income tax generates tax revenue just as well, and the government’s incentive to protect copyrights domestically is the fact that it is the law. Internationally is a matter of politics, but I do not see a clear black and white answer for why copyright would need to be enforced internationally.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    > Income tax generates tax revenue just as well Income tax generates tax revenue. Whether it's "just as well" as other forms of taxing is debatable. In at least some countries, wealth is taxed less than labour, which increases a class distinction. Less income taxes in favour of other taxes may redress that balance. Or it may not - economists and ouija boards can give you predictions.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Sure, but I do not see the purpose of creating a special tax scheme just for copyrighted works. If you want to hit everyone with a wealth tax, then do it the same way for all assets.
johnhowardstein 5y ago

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Don’t see why the government should be profiting so much out of that.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
Copyright only exists because the government uses its monopoly on violence to protect it. Why should it not get a decent cut of the pie after a decade or so? The average property tax is about 1%, so why should copyright be treated as something special? Especially, if the rent is collected by a third party that purchased the rights, their relationship to the creation of the underlying asset is no different to a landlord. I'd dispense with this self-valuation business though and just charge a 1% tax on net present value of the asset. If the copyright holder releases their claim early, then they'll get a tax refund for previous payments at the recalculated net present value.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  "Why should it not get a decent cut of the pie after a decade or so?" well i guess it depends on if you view the government as a profit seeking entity trying to maximally price its IP protection product, or if you view it as societal infrastructure.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    Society works when people feel better off within than without, when that's not true, then people stop respecting laws and generally act asocial. Copyright holders get an excellent deal by living in a society that allows them to collect rents that can add up into the millions of even billions. But how about the work-a-day folks? What's in it for them? An abstract idea that allowing the descendants of creators to collect economic rents for generations after their death, might result in a greater throughput in creative works... somehow. No, for society to work, then rent seeking must be reigned in. A copyright wealth tax would still allow rights holders to become fabulously wealthy, but they'd have to give something back in return. Something more than normal income tax, because of the rent seeking nature of their enterprise.

AuthorizedCust 5y ago

Why do so many proposals to increase liberties come with a new tax? The government isn’t some beast we have to appease. It’s us! If we want to reform copyright, we don’t need to bribe ourselves with a new tax.

esrauch 5y ago
Taxes (and tax deductions) are generally one of the best ways to align incentives. If it's a binary condition then you have tons of derelict content that should really be public domain, but because of the big ticket well-maintained Disney content the laws are written to be "reasonable" for that content and it ends up unnecessary locking up all of the other content from the 1970s

nsgi 5y ago

How would you value the product of a startup, or some open source software that doesn't make any money but the creator wants to use a copyleft license for? Also, how would this work internationally? Would you have to pay a proportion of the value to the US government even if the US is a small market for you?

izacus 5y ago
What kind of "startup product" is 15 or 20 years old and has been unchanged since then? That would be older than Google for example.
- bhelkey 5y ago
  > That would be older than Google for example. Google was incorporated in 1998 [1]. To be fair, the patent for PageRank has since expired [2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150623193037/https://www.google.com/about/company/history/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150623193037/https://www.googl... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999 https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999
tlbsofware 5y ago
My guess would be that after the initial period of no taxes if the company wasn’t able to turn a profit on the patent then they would have to either sell the patent to avoid taxes or list it as a value that they would manage to be able to pay taxes and start raising money, might help with patent/copyright squatting

snarf21 5y ago

We should just drop to 50 years. Most people have a working career of 50 years. Having 50 years to earn off your creation seems fair to everyone.

bacchusracine 5y ago
>Having 50 years to earn off your creation seems fair to everyone. Everyone? Hold on there a moment, Jack. I'm a copyright minimalist. Seven years with one renewal for a total of fourteen years seems much more fair to me considering all the years we've already had of continually delayed releases into the public domain. We the people have paid to enforce those years of copyright without the corresponding payoff at the end of the term release to the public. There's nothing fair about that situation and it needs to be addressed.

quags 5y ago

Ideally, in a perfect world this makes sense but will not work in reality. This just gives a way for any larger player to easily get something in the public domain from a smaller player with less resources. The tax concept is a good concept, maybe like how we have large banks under more scrutiny over a certain level - but this may lead to small IP companies that just hold ip in order to get below the threshold. Star Wars LLC licensing to disney to be under whatever threshold is designed. Copyright in reality should protect the smaller players from the bigger players, a 30 year time frame for an author to profit before the public domain, so a company can not horde IP makes more sense.

efsavage 5y ago

I've long advocated something generally like this, for patents and other IP as well. I would propose a longer initial term (~30-50 years) since the nature and value of IP has changed significantly since the 1700s. I would also put an upper limit on it, since the most valuable IP is now held by immortal corporations. The hard part for copyright is tracking what has been renewed and what has not, without some kind of registration system, which I don't think we want to add. Without this, it would make it very difficult to know if the work you intend to use/copy/distribute is protected or not.

rhino369 5y ago

That is a very interesting idea. But I think you would want at least a 14 year grace period with no property tax. Another possibility is a use-it-or-lose-it scheme like that used in Trademarks. If you built a game that is now abandonware, it should be fair game for someone else to remaster it, etc.