Making The Justice Dept. A Copyright Busybody

poptones writes "The Senate Judiciary committee has just approved four new bills relating to IP law in the U.S. A couple of them provide some much needed reforms for the patent process including raising fees, raising fees more for those who most use the system, and providing discounts for small entities (who'da thunk?)" According to poptones, "Unfortunately, all is not good" -- read on below to see how the RIAA and MPAA stand to gain from one of these bills in particular.

This bill, put forward by your friends and mine, Msrs. Leahy and Hatch, would task the JD with filing civil actions against "pirates" - essentially putting your tax dollars to work bringing civil actions against college students in the name of the very largest Copyright holders, allowing them even more spare pocket change to spend lobbying to restrict your already shrinking online freedoms. A choice snippet from the floor: "For too long, Federal prosecutors have been hindered in their pursuit of pirates, by the fact that they were limited to bringing criminal charges with high burdens of proof..."

And it gets better: "In the long run, I believe that we must find better mechanisms to ensure that our most vulnerable citizens--our children--are not being constantly tempted to infringe the copyrights that have made America a world leader in the production of creative works." Hold on to your wallets folks, they're telling us to "think of the children" again..."

Comments

Copyright should become a tax

[Anonymous Coward]

The more you make off your copyright and the more protection need, the more you should pay. You create a level below a certain point where you're not taxed (say... $10,000), and then after that, you pay. You could also tie it to length, so a longer copyright would cost more than a new one.

Re:Copyright should become a tax

[silentbozo]

The more you make off your copyright and the more protection need, the more you should pay.

I was thinking the exact same thing, only it should not only be tied to the asset valuation, but to time as well. For example, for the first 5 years of a copyright, you don't get taxed - after that, you get assessed an "Intellectual Property Tax".

The problem with the idea is that asset taxes are inherently evil - so evil that I'm not sure that I'd want to create a new bureaucracy to handle the assessment, levying, and paperwork. It's bad enough we have property taxes (and for very unlucky folks), business asset taxes (ie, I buy a computer, pay a sales tax, and for the next 5 years, I have to pay 3% of the remaining value on the computer to the local county). Can you imagine some auditor going into the library of congress, and sending off letters to authors, playwrights, etc., arguing that their work is worth $X, even though it's been out of print for years, and that they owe back taxes?

On the other hand, if we can't get a limitation to copyright duration, then we should be taxing the hell out of it, so at least SOME public good comes out of it.

When copyright and IP laws are torn all to hell, blame the MPAA and the RIAA for trying to push the envelope and just not being smart enough to leave things alone (just as traditional junk mailers and call centers can blame spammers and telemarketers for the woes that have befallen them as a result of super-sensitizing people to ad-interruptions.)

Re:Copyright should become a tax

[j1m 5n0w]

What if it was a monotonically increasing percentage of revenue? Like a sales tax, but it gets more each decade. For instance:

• first 10 years: free
• next 10 years: 10% of revenue
• next 10 years: 20% of revenue
• ???
• Profit! Err, I mean, Enter Public Domain!

This way, if Disney is still making substantial revenue from an old work, they pay a proportionally high fee.

There should probably also be an exponentially increasing minimum "copyright maintenance" fee, to create an incentive to put works that generate no revenue into the public domain.

It seems reasonable to me that lengthy copyright protection should be a paid service. Copyright seems like a system of getting something for nothing (which isn't always a bad thing, but current copyright laws have become ridiculous).

-jim

wouldn't that benefit the GPL?

[Goeland86]

Wait, wouldn't that same bill also allow the Attorney General to prosecute people infringing the GPL? If we use the open licenses more and more, it serves us in the end, no? Or does it apply only to copyrights made with the copyright office? I think this could be indeed a useful law in the future, if used by us GPL lovers. What do you think?