3 ms·

While nice in theory, there's no way I can see that working in practice. With real property there are comparable sales and the like, which can be reasonably ac

by cdjk 14y ago

While nice in theory, there's no way I can see that working in practice. With real property there are comparable sales and the like, which can be reasonably accurate - if another townhouse in the same complex sold for $x one month, $x is pretty good estimate of the other values in the complex. Even this gets tricky when you get out to a more rural area like wear I live, and the only other sales are significantly larger or smaller houses. I'm not even sure how you could do comparable sales for intellectual property. Yeah, Disney's publicly traded, but imagine an trying to assess the value of an asset owned by a privately held company that doesn't have to disclose any financial information. And even if you could assess values, look at the mess of property taxes in California with Prop. 13.

hermannj314 14y ago
I think you could address that if you pay taxes based on a declared worth $X with the provision that anyone can exercise the option to buy the intellectual property from you for $X or you can reassess at a higher price/move your IP to the public domain. The problem with this is that the creators of marketable and valuable IP could not exercise creative control of their IP without paying a tax on the market value of their IP even if they don't make money on it. Not sure about that. I'm not buying into this idea at all, just adding a perspective.
- cdjk 14y ago
  That might work for the likes of disney, but seems like it could be really unfair to smaller copyright holders. Suppose I write a successful novel, and that the "IP tax" is 1%. If I value it at $10m, my yearly tax is going to be untenable at $100k, but that $10m is a rounding error for a large studio that wants the movie rights. Yeah, I realize you could tweak the numbers, but I think it's a valid objection. One approach I have heard that might work is that you get some amount of time of free copyright (20, 30, 50 years), and then have an increasing copyright-registration fee for each year or extension period beyond that, up to some maximum term. It could either increase linearly or exponentially, or someplace in between. I'm not entirely sure it would work, but I think the idea has some merit.

by cdjk 14y ago

hermannj314 14y ago

I think you could address that if you pay taxes based on a declared worth $X with the provision that anyone can exercise the option to buy the intellectual property from you for $X or you can reassess at a higher price/move your IP to the public domain. The problem with this is that the creators of marketable and valuable IP could not exercise creative control of their IP without paying a tax on the market value of their IP even if they don't make money on it. Not sure about that. I'm not buying into this idea at all, just adding a perspective.

cdjk 14y ago
That might work for the likes of disney, but seems like it could be really unfair to smaller copyright holders. Suppose I write a successful novel, and that the "IP tax" is 1%. If I value it at $10m, my yearly tax is going to be untenable at $100k, but that $10m is a rounding error for a large studio that wants the movie rights. Yeah, I realize you could tweak the numbers, but I think it's a valid objection. One approach I have heard that might work is that you get some amount of time of free copyright (20, 30, 50 years), and then have an increasing copyright-registration fee for each year or extension period beyond that, up to some maximum term. It could either increase linearly or exponentially, or someplace in between. I'm not entirely sure it would work, but I think the idea has some merit.