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If IP Is Property, Where Is the Property Tax?
nweaver writes "In a response to the LA Times editorial on copyright which we discussed a week ago, the paper published a response arguing: 'If Intellectual Property is actually property, why isn't it covered by a property tax?' If copyright maintenance involved paying a fee and registration, this would keep Mickey Mouse safely protected by copyright, while ensuring that works that are no longer economically relevant to the copyright holder pass into the public domain, where the residual social value can serve the real purpose of copyright: to enhance the progress of science and useful arts. Disclaimer: the author is my father."
On the face of it, I love that idea. The bigger question would be how do you determine the value of the IP to assess it for taxation.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
This first post is public domain and I therefore have no property taxes to pay on it
Ian Ameline
Real property (real estate) has property tax, but no one taxes you for personal property.
I am sitting in a chair, no one is going to TAX me on the fact that I own some chair (personal property).
Weak argument.
Its easy why it isn't, almost everyone owns some piece of IP. For example, this comment, it could be considered IP, now should I have to pay essentially a fee on that? No. Or what about a program I wrote, should I have to pay a tax to license it under say the GPL? What really needs to happen, is lower copyright terms and the abolishment of the "forever copyright" and also, what in the world does the government do with all their copyright fees?
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
There are maintenance fees. From http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/mainten.htm :
"All utility patents which issue from applications filed on and after December 12, 1980 are subject to the payment of maintenance fees which must be paid to maintain the patent in force. These fees are due at 3 ½, 7 ½ and 11 ½ years from the date the patent is granted and can be paid without a surcharge during the "window-period" which is the six month period preceding each due date, e.g., 3 years to 3 years and six months. (See fee schedule for a list of maintenance fees.)
Failure to pay the current maintenance fee on time may result in expiration of the patent. A 6-month grace period is provided when the maintenance fee may be paid with a surcharge. The grace period is the 6-month period immediately following the due date. The Patent and Trademark Office does not mail notices to patent owners that maintenance fees are due. If, however, the maintenance fee is not paid on time, efforts are made to remind the responsible party that the maintenance fee may be paid during the grace period with a surcharge."
There are fees associated with maintaining patents (due at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years), and failure to pay them on schedule results in cancellation of the patent.
For example, the kid who wrote Chocolate Rain has a potential revenue stream from the YouTube advert. You can bet he wouldn't have guessed that he would get almost 15 million views - so he would automatically have ceeded his potential copyright into the public domain. Someone else who saw the potential could have stepped in, linked it to all the right sites, and took all the advertising revenue for themselves.
This is an issue which will resolve itself just as soon as the internet becomes the main (legitimate) medium for entertainment distribution. At this point all the money currently spent on old media advertising follows the shows to YouTube or whereever they are being distributed. This creates, in effect, a democratic marketplace which rewards creativity; which will allow viral video authors to generate a revenue stream and (if they wish) go mainstream. Well, that's the dream, anyway.. and at that point all the big copyright trolls can go fuck themselves as their precious content they horde will have become almost worthless.
That's what mommy told you anyway. :->
The idea is very good. Even not performing assets (i.e. unrented buildings) pay property taxes; of course, if I'm getting $3,000 a month rent from an apartment it is very likely that my property taxes will be higher than if it is a rundown hole in the wall, but even then taxes must be paid.
The problem is that the companies seeking longer copyright terms are precisely those whose assets are generating income, so adding 3 or 5 percent tax will not stop them; it will be the consumer who has to pay it through an increase in prices.
The real solution is to limit copyright terms to a reasonable,/i> amount of time; no more than 20 years from registration. Period. No extensions, no games, nothing more. If in 20 years you haven't reaped the just reward for your work, then you will never do it.
If you have reaped your reward, then twenty years is a fair amount of time./P.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Lots of things are property. If the naked cowboy can sue for unauthorized use of his name and likeness, should he have to pay property tax on his name? Or what about a research paper? I don't want my papers plagiarized or sold in unintended ways, but I shouldn't have to pay just to publish a paper, either.
In most states in America, personal property other than real estate and cars are not taxed or not taxed by value.
In most states, intangible property, including bank accounts, stocks, patents, etc. are not taxed or not taxed by value.
Real Estate, land-use/minerals, and sometimes cars and big-ticket items and the other property of wealthy individuals is taxed.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Perhaps a percentage based system might be effective. A percentage of the gross I would think. Due yearly as property taxes are.
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You are giving them tax ideas?
I think Heinlein had the solution to that (he used it for real property). You declare a value, you pay taxes based on that, and anybody can force you to sell it to them at that price.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
so who will ensure that the government or any other party does not tax my brain... I mean will anybody that has higher education (thus potentially more IP between their ears) need to pay extra tax because they might have some insight that other mortals don't have?
I for one really dislike the idea on a fundamental level.
Ya...ya.. RTFM
Not a lawyer here: A corporation has rights as a person and it owns property, but it never dies and never pays an inheritance tax on their coveted IP property or copyright. Their lifespan can far exceed a persons. It does not sound fair to me. What do the corp lawyers say?
cc
The whole problem with requiring an annual fee to maintain your copyright is that the little guy would get screwed. Many artists spend their whole life creating and virtually starving to death (because sales require promotion and promotion costs money), only to become successful at the end and their early work thereby becomes profitable. They could not afford to maintain their copyrights if fees where involved and then Mickey and friends could step in a utilize their work for nothing.
A better solution would be to only charge a copyright fee on copyrights held by corporations (i.e. created under a work for hire license or purchased from the artist). When the artist who created the work still holds the copyright (and has no contractual obligations to a company on the use of that work) the current system works fairly decently. Since a company's main priority is its bottom line, unprofitable works would be released into the public domain sooner, but the little guy would still be able to benefit from his / her individual work.
Technology is most abused by the very people it was created to help
that the shirt on your back isn't covered by a property tax?
Doh.
I understand this line of thought is really about IP, not about tax and rights...but I would like to thank the author for perpetuating the idea that even if something is YOURS, you still have to pay the government for it.
If the government can deprive you of a basic right (property as a basic right in the state of nature, Voltaire, Hobbs, Locke, T. Jefferson) simply because you don't pay for the privilege of enjoying the right, then rights are privileges, not rights.
I guess war and welfare aren't going to pay for themselves...
THL phish sticks
If it is taxed, tax revenues would rapidly become another reason for the state to preserve the copyright monopoly system's existence - Consider that USPTO (patents and trademarks, which require maintenance fees that are almost like taxes) is also profitmaking for the state - part of the "problem" with the USPTO is that those profits are actually bled off for purposes other than running the USPTO. Effectively, corporations buy market monopolies at knock-down prices from the state, while the state pretends it's doing to reward innovation.
The correct solution is to abolish copyright (and patent if you ask me). If someone doesn't want their work copied, they don't have to fucking release it. Don't try to burden society with a censorship system in every PC and network to preserve copyrights, that is moronic, and just gives the police-state-builders another _excuse_ for the Big Brother surveillance system they want.
Patents have a maintenance fee. Why not copyrights?
Why not charge a maintenance fee for copyrights every ten years? That way, most stuff will go into the public domain ten years after publication. It won't bother most people, because most people's copyrighted stuff isn't valuable the next day, let alone ten years later, and if it is they can always extend it.
The hard part would be figuring out what to charge for copyrights of commercial material, like proprietary software, books, music, and the like. I'm sure people can figure out something halfway reasonable, likely on the low side.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So it's often discussed that there is some sort of trade-off for the copyright monopoly: you get this limited monopoly to spur your creation of new works, and we get the benefit of the new work plus the freedom to do whatever we want with it when the copyright has expired. Nobody seems to work out, though, exactly why the monopoly should end before all commercial value has been harvested. It seems to me that unless you take a somewhat relaxed stance toward personal property, you have to recognize that expiration of copyright prior to exhaustion of value takes something from the author. Similarly, though, a term extending beyond the useful economic viability of a copyright imposes unjustifiable costs on the public- costs which don't even end up in the hands of the authors of those works. Fairness would seem to suggest that rather than fixed terms, we need something that would allow for the slow development of a market in a work, but that would kick the work to the public domain after a reasonable period.
can the American public be forced to stop thinking due to the penalty of being taxed for it? my thoughts are my Intelectual property aren't they? atleast until someone finds a way to read minds. I guess the only way to tell would be to scan thoughts in which they would then be public thoughts and then public domain therefore not taxable. would childrens thoughts under the age of thirteen be non-taxable? I should stop thinking, I think I hear the IRS coming.
Great. I can see the boston brain party now... Chumming the harbor with brains will attract the sharks, or as I like to call them Democrats.
Noooooo! It's unpossible!
Search your feelings, boy, you know the content to be true!
FYI, I think it's a load of crap. (1) because only certain type of property get taxed, at least here in the US, I only pay tax on my car and home. Not my computer, TV, radio gear, home furnishings, etc. (2) Because, as mentioned several times already, there is a maintenance fee schedule to help comp the system. And (3), it'd be a state thing. The state taxes my car. The state taxes my property. We have enough problems with people sung from certain districts in Texas (and elsewhere) over patents, what if we get some state that sets themselves up as a patent haven, where the fees are low and the laws loose? It wouldn't work out.
The idea of property tax is that the owners of property owe something back to society. The idea goes back to feudalism when the land owners were feudal lords. Instead of(or in addition to) taxes, feudal lords could be called on to send knights into battle as a condition of their land ownership. If they couldn't fulfill the duty, the land would be taken away and given to someone who could...
The same idea could be applied to intellectual property. The owners of intellectual property should be required to give something back to society. As some other posters have pointed out, the problem becomes valuing the property. The easiest way to value intellectual property is by how much income it brings in to the owner.
By that measure, intellectual property is already taxed. The tax is simply paid through the corporate or individual income tax.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
This reminds me of when the county of Los Angeles tried to tax satellites. If it has any value to anyone in any way, they will tax it.
That said, taxes are the cost of a civil society.
Make that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_valorem
Don't add a / to the end of Wikipedia links. They don't work if you do.
An IP property tax might be awful. Suppose you copyright something and then it doesn't sell. Should you have to dig into your pocket just to keep the book you wrote from slipping into the public domain (like what would happen if you fail to pay to maintain the patent)? That would really stick it to the little guy. And of course the tax might be wildly disproportionate (high or low) to the value created.
If the copyright helps some produce income, the income tax will get its fair share. It is appropriate to question the transfer prices for sale/transfer of IP to foreign jurisdictions and no doubt the treasury is getting the bad end of some tax cheating, but that is a largely separate issue.
--
The contents of my house are considered property as well - yet I don't pay tax on them.
I had thought better of the LA Times - that they wouldn't indulge in these kinds of semantic games.
Which is kind of a dumb place to start, considering that in the US, property taxes don't apply to most non-intellectual property. The main tax on property you find is on real property, and you occasionally find property taxes or the effective equivalent on some special items of tangible personal property (i.e., California's valuation-based "Vehicle License Fee" which is very similar to a property tax on automobiles, though not quite the same.)
There might be good arguments for property taxes on intellectual property, but the idea that "if it it is called property, it must have property tax" is not one of the better ones.
A scheme like that would be terrible for open-source. So you write your program and GPL it, don't pay the property tax. Someone takes it and modifies it, does pay the property tax. Now they've turned your GPL software into proprietary software.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
An entire idea based around a "play-on-words" due to the similarity of two terms in English?
Putting forward an argument for taxing copyrights is fine (the discussion that is, not the idea - taxing me every time I create an original work is absurd), but saying that "Intellectual Property" should have a tax because land has a "Property Tax" and both phrases contain "property" is not an analogy that supports either your own or your fathers ideas.
We could have called IP "Intellectual Content Ownership" instead, and then your entire introduction falls apart. Maybe you were trying for a smart, catchy introduction that makes sense enough to catch someones eye even if that isn't where the substance of the idea lies - however you failed to take into account that Slashdot readers generally hate the human race as a whole and will pick apart any such attempts to mock our self-engrandised intellects..
The author seems to say that IP must be taxed because all property is taxed. This is BS. Most property isn't taxed. You don't pay a tax on everything you own. Generally the only thing you'll pay tax on is a house and that's mainly to pay for the services (road/water/...) you get to that house.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
As outlined in Copyright law, I agreed to give certain people(later it got extended to artificial persons but that is a complaint for another time) some exclusive rights to thoughts, ideas, and other intangible property. For this massive and profitable gift of rights they agreed to among other things allow far use, and after a limited time turn (many cases return) that in intangible property to the public domain.
That agreement has been routinely breeched by large corporations. One reason I feel no moral remorse for violating those granted rights.
In re to property tax for these intangibles: There's nothing in copyright law nor should there be stating that persons/entities with money can buy a different set of rules.
Shame on Bill Clinton for passing the DMCA, URAA, and Sonny Bonno Copyright extension act.
I know, that was Bill, but please, no more Clinton's.
You'd have to pay an infinite amount of money in tax (any percentage of infinity is infinite), but then you'd write off that expense, resulting in an infinite tax write off, bankrupting the gov't.
Works for me!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"""
If Intellectual Property is actually property, why isn't it covered by a property tax?
"""
Not all forms of property are land. My computer, for instance, is my property. But, do I pay "property tax" on it. NO.
This has to be one of the dumbest things that I've heard of in a while. Seriously, why don't people use there brain filters before publishing moronic bullshit like this any more?
Property tax is evil, and it should not be legal. The whole point of property is that once you have something, it's yours and no one can take it from you. With property tax, it's like you don't really own your property, and you are just renting it from the government. Once you stop paying, they come and take it away from you.
Moreover, if you are going to ask where is the tax on IP, why don't you ask where the tax is on everyday objects around your house. Where is the property tax on industrial equipment, where is the property tax on you bank account, your stock investments, the money other people owe you, labor contracts? All these things are forms of property that are used to generate revenue but are not taxed under property tax.
The government should not be able to place an arbitrary value and tax rate on any property. I should have the right to be secure in my possessions. If I don't have that right, I don't have any property at all.
Well, it's not quite what I would suggest, but it's far from a terrible idea; in fact it is similar to how we used to do things only a few decades ago.
We should have a system of copyright where an author only gets a copyright if he publishes his work, registers for a copyright, deposits a copy of the work, and pays a token fee. And where the copyright only lasts for a few years before the author must renew the copyright (if eligible, depending on the kind of work and the number of times it's been renewed already).
We know that this would work well, since it's more or less what US copyright law did up until 1978. We know that the goal of copyright is to serve the public interest by encouraging authors to create works they otherwise would not have created, but having those works minimally protected and in the public domain as rapidly as possible. This serves this goal well, since probably only authors who were encouraged by the availability of copyright would bother to undertake even the very simple steps to procure one. Further, if an author was encouraged by a shorter duration than the maximum allowed, he would likely fail to renew (as usually happened historically), getting that work in the public domain much sooner than if we foolishly gave him as long a term as we could without any involvement on the author's part. It gets copies preserved in the Library of Congress, which can help to ensure the survival of the work over time (especially once it enters the public domain). And requiring him to identify the work claimed, and himself, and his contact information, aids in the public knowing what is and isn't protected (like the title system for land), who to talk to about it, and where he can be reached if you need to license it, etc.
Sure, some amateur authors would create works without regard for a copyright, and the works might turn out to have been valuable, but so what? The system isn't meant to help them at all costs, it is meant to encourage them to create what they would not have created sans copyright. Your Chocolate Rain kid probably wouldn't qualify. That's good, really. Why should the public pay for the cow if the milk is free? Copyright isn't meant to help authors, or be fair to them; it's meant to be totally one-sided in favor of the public, but sometimes the thing that is most in the long-term public interest isn't what is in the short-term public interest.
(Plus of course, only an author can claim a copyright on his works initially; it's not as though anyone could take a public domain work away from its author, who could also try to exploit it for money; it's just that the author cannot exclusively exploit it)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
We should be able to own certain things outright. Property taxes turn everyone into renters and servants. Even old people who have paid all their bills and mortgage sometimes get turned out into the street. This is not fair. And it leads the government to see us as mere tax parcels that can be maximized through eminent domain and other crap that generally screws middle-class and poor people in favor of richer developers and politicians.
We can have purchase and transfer and profits taxes on property, but recurring taxes on real property is something a king would do to his serfs, not something we should allow in a republic of sovereign individuals.
And in most places endlessly recurring property taxes are funding education. It is no wonder that allowing endless plunder of our property with assessments pulled out of thin air leads to endless increases in the cost of education with little to show.
Education should not be funded with local recurring property taxes. And people shouldn't have to move to a different neighborhood to get to a better school or suffer the misfortune of growing up in a shithole neighborhood with the crap schools your local government might provide.
I'm not sure about the laws elsewhere, but in Canada, some forms of intellectual property are taxed. In order to retain a canadian patent you must pay an annual fee. The principle is to stop people from sitting on patents they arn't using or don't intend to use. If you fail to pay the annual fee, you loose the patent. I'm not sure what happens to it afterwards, it probably becomes public domain, or the property of the canadian government. The only problem is it hurts the little guys while having no effect on large corporations. Perhaps we could devide companies into patent brackets the same way we devide tax payers into income brackets.
What a great idea! We could have a schedule of taxes or fees due every few years to maintain IP or it would become dedicated to the public. We do that with patents.
Or, if that's too complicated, we could just ask copyright holders to identify which copyrights they care about and submit a simple application to maintain them or let them flow into the public domain. We did that for nearly two centuries until 1976.
It's just amazing how little we demand that the holders of incredibly valuable copyrights do to obtain those rights and to keep them.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
It's NOT property that's why there's no property tax. And it should NEVER be property.
Believe me, most of us won't want it to be property if we really know the full implications.
Copying is a big difference from moving.
People keep saying without patents and copyright nobody will do stuff, that's BULLSHIT.
What next, tennis players or martial artists or golfers copyrighting/patenting moves so that their opponents can't copy them? The last I checked they still compete, the top ones aren't a bunch of wusses and cry babies.
If anyone really thinks that sort of thing will speed up progress and benefit society then they're smoking some serious shit (and I don't want any).
Patents are for inventors who can only come up with one good idea in their entire life.
Copyrights are for singers who can only come up with one good song in their whole lifetime (or for companies who enslave them). They can't compete, not even with their previous work, and so we have to slow down progress for them?
OK I exaggerate a bit, but point is the monopolies are for way too long (120 years = bullshit), the faster the pace of the world the shorter the terms should be. Making money from a super "long tail" is not what we want to encourage. If copyright terms were shorter Microsoft won't dare make something as crap as Vista. If you say they wouldn't have bothered making windows at all, I think Apple or someone else would have been happy to take our money instead.
The rest of us know that coming up with good tunes and good ideas isn't that difficult. It's getting them to market at the right time, and getting market share/acceptance is the hard bit.
Go ask Douglas Engelbart and his team. They're what I call true innovators.
In China the companies there rampantly copy each other too and there's still money to be made.
Despite that sort of thing a Chinese singer[1] said she makes more money in China than in Europe, but she prefers Europe because she thinks they're actually fans of her music (rather than her looks etc)
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7251211.stm
The person who wrote this article doesn't seem to understand how taxes work. Property tax is *real estate* tax. Has the person who wrote this article never filed a tax return?
Also, the federal government doesn't *have* a property tax, only an income tax. Some *local* governments have property taxes, but again, only on real estate. Land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax#United_States
What a moron.
What a positively uninformed presupposition.
1. The Tax on IP is the Patent Fees, 1,000 here, 5,000 here, and pretty soon you're talking real money. How many of you pay $5,000 in property tax?
2. The Full Confiscation of IP after 20 Years. So take your property and amortize a 20 year buyout, you'll find your effective taxes are the same as your present mortgage. That is effectively a ~6-8% tax on IP.
3. Property Flight. If California posed a 2% tax on IP, every IP holder would move their paper office to Delaware - oops they already did. If Delaware imposed a tax on IP, they would move the IP to Sri Lanka. You tax things that can't run.
sheesh...
AIK
if you were valuating property. The question in the article is an interesting one, but only as far as it (and the discussion on valuation here) shows the absurdity of the proposition that copyright and related rights can, or should be treated as "property".
In fact, the basic concepts and concerns about copyright and related rights haven't changed much since the legislation was first introduced. those rights are still best explained by the original contract -- a limited in time monopoly to the author (so that they are pressured to monetize their invention), granted by the society, in exchange for the right of the society to use the knowledge for free when the monopoly expires.
What has changed is the power of the copyright owners to lobby and do marketing with the only goal of subverting the original contract and granting perpetual monopoly. Now they push for (and sometimes successfully get) new laws that extend the monopoly at the expense of the society.
in doing so, the copyright owners have, as far as i can see so far succeeded in the following:
- make the rules of copyright and related rights complex, enforcement costly, and in the process stifle the creative process.
- extended the protection, without being able to show much increase of creativity in exchange.
( if someone can point me to findings of the opposite, i'll be interested to read it, but as far as I can see, the effects of protection have been either detrimental or neutral to creativity, not positive. )
- diverted directly a large pool of resources into non-creative initiatives, such as lobbying, litigation, "don't steal" marketing campaigns, etc.. i don't really see how all this contributes.
- caused (via paid-for legislation) a large pool of resources to be diverted from useful technological development into useless stuff like copy protection, which eventually gets broken.
- since copyright enforcement the way it is seen these days requires close surveillance of the behaviour of copyrighted work consumers, the promoters of "intellectual property" have been pushing for a climate of constant monitoring, which has (especially in the last year or two) been embraced by more and more governments all over the world. once in place, who knows what these measures will be used for.
All these facts mean that any discussion that mentions "IP" without explaining the original contract, and emphasizing that "IP" is just an effort of the large (meh, small too) copyright owners to pirate the public domain that belongs to the society is either dishonest, or misguided.
WTF? All these proposed solutions result in nothing more than a property rental system. Forced sale? WTF! If I purchase something (tangible or or otherwise) I will keep it until I want to sell it (or give it away). If I as a company own some IP that is no longer of any value to me, I have a right to sell it to anyone I want. I can also give it away if I so desire. But no one can say that I HAVE to sell or give it away. If I purchase a car and it eventually has no value to me (for whatever reason) I can sell it, give it away, or keep it. But, nobody can say to me "That car has no value to you, therefore you have to sell it to me for equal value."
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Imagine the value of an asset like the trademark of Disney or the copyright for Mickey(which will never expire as the time keeps extending)
If valuers think that the "value" of the all Mickey products that could be on the market and how much would people pay and how strong the desire is to make Mickey clones, he might put it at $1Bn. So thats 300mil in tax. Then we got Goofey, Donald, Bambi, Simba, and the list goes on and on with the biggest of all being Winnie the Pooh... All of these copyrights could cost millions per year to hold onto as their value goes up.
Hopefully at some point the cost of keeping them becomes more than the loss of releasing them to the public domain and we all benefit.
Tax profit making licenses hard enough and they'll stop trying to license the damn things. :-P
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
1. you need a full spectrum of taxes. say you didn't have a sales tax. some people would generate all of their income and sales, and owe nothing. they freeload. or say there is no property taxes. some would simply acquire land and owe no taxes. its unfair to some guy who doesn't own land. it is in fact a nice way to start a landed gentry and a population of serfs. yeah, that's progress
2. land property is an abstract concept. money in fact is an abstract concept. land property, or money, has no meaning except in relation to your relationship with society. there is no way to think of property as some sort of natural right, something that you innately possess as your own, on your own, like intelligence or age. as such, thinking of your property as some sort of natural appendage of yours is philosophcally false
libertarianism starts out with some very noble beliefs, but it is incredibly naive about how society really works. all libertarian ideals result in, in the real world, is aristocracy, and an underclass of poor. that's not the stated goal of libertarianism of course, but that is in fact what libertarian ideas result in: an unnatural concentration of wealth in some hands, and the absence of it in others. sure, libertarianism is championed in the name of equality and the middle class, but the results of libertarianism is to destroy equality and the middle class. the idea of libertarianism is founded on a flawed understanding of how society really works. you need a balancing force, a central government to make sure nothing gets out of hand. you don't simply let independent players proceed as they want without oversight. run that simulation: a few years later you get robber barons and starving poor. wealth accumulates. you must therefore exert governmental pressure to make sure the playing field stays level
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Property tax as it is practiced right now is a *real estate* tax on your *land* and it is only taken by some local governments (cities, counties, etc), not by the federal government, which only collects income taxes, social security tax, and the occasional tariff.
The "property tax" this guy is talking about is tax on your possessions. Do you really want to pay taxes on your computer? On your car? Do you want to pay the government to keep the stuff you already own every year? That's what this guy is talking about in his article, although he seems to be somehow unaware that we don't already do that. I think most of us would go broke inside of two years if we had to pay tax on every bit of property we have.
The guy who wrote this article clearly has never actually *paid* taxes, otherwise he would know this stuff. He thinks he's extending an existing tax to IP, but it is a tax that doesn't even exist for anything.
Also, as for IP, I have to think that it's a little ridiculous that if I write a book, or some software or whatever, I would have to pay the government for the privilege of saying that it is my book or my software. I already have to pay income tax every time I *sell* a copy of a book that I wrote, now I'd have to pay money for just having wrote it.
It sounds like he wants to come up with a law to essentially force people to give their IP to the public domain, which seems like an authoritarian measure, and essentially amounts to nationalizing personal property. However, you should note this would not only be bad for commercial software developers, but also for open source developers.
This law would be bad because open source developers would *also* have to pay this tax on all of the code they write. Public domain and GPL are not legally the same. GPL'd software is still owned by someone, they just give out a nonexclusive license for others to use it. Much of Linux is owned by Linus Torvalds and other developers. The monetary value of the Linux kernel is probably enormous. Do you really want Linus paying millions a year in taxes on the work he's done? The FSF would have the same problem under this law.
This law seems designed to hurt commercial software developers, a goal I can't say I agree with since I work for one. However, even if you are for taxing commercial software developers, I don't understand how you can be for a law which would do the same to open source developers, who may or may not even make a profit on their work.
Frankly, I don't see how new taxes would make anything better in the software development world. This is clearly the idea of someone who either doesn't pay taxes, or doesn't develop any kind of software, open source or otherwise, but probably both.
My
All IP should be assessed a resale value (per unit or per license) and a registration tax (federal, as you register with the copyright or patent office) has to be paid (say 8% of said value on a yearly basis). This resale value is then set as the price for any of the licensors.
If the price goes up when selling the IP to a competitor or somebody that wants to use it, the actual registration tax is re-calculated all the way back (like when you cheat on taxes) and you have to pay the price and if grossly misstated, a fine on top or even better, an invalidation of the IP.
If you sue somebody for copyright/patent infringement then that value is the actual loss figure that the judge can use to calculate an objective and reasonable figure because if you register something for billions of dollars, expect to pay millions in registration, yearly.
For free and open-source stuff, you could register for free since 8% of 0 is still 0, just an online form will do with the requirement of a sample or the code of the program and it's license. Stuff that is not licensed with an office would be possible too, but then as the above examples, the value and the registration taxes are calculated when a court upholds your IP and assesses a value for it so that the actual income of patent trolls is greatly diminished (if you hold something for 5 years, giving away 40% of the damages awarded will greatly cut the paycheck of lawyers). The value a court assesses should be similar to values of similar IP that is registered, so no ballooned values anymore.
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US patents have "maintenance fees" every few years, and they're not cheap. Over the life of the patent, you pay about $8000 in maintenance fees. (There's a discount if you're an individual or a "small entity").
If we had that for copyright, even at a much lower price point, the public domain would be much larger. Unfortunately, the copyright lobby got a "no formalities" rule into the TRIPS agreement, so no country in the WTO can do that.
This is a terrible idea, and here's why: it immediately turns something already of dubious benefit to society (copyrights, which now extend into infinity every time Congress sees fit to expand them) into a cash cow for the government. This ensures there will never be any discussion of reducing copyright duration, something that's long overdue.
Dog is my co-pilot.
A recurring fee just turns the whole arrangement into an explicit protection racket. "So, youse gots dis here idea youse don't want nothin' to happen to..."
Florida has an intangible-property tax designed to target retirees.\
Many states do not.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Imagine, for instance, if health care were both nationalized and paid for by cigarette taxes.
Dog is my co-pilot.
>I've been advocating that exact idea for a while, with one slight change: if that happens,
>the IP in question goes into the public domain instead of to the purchaser.
GPL and public domain are not the same thing. Linus owns parts of Linux and holds a trademark on Linux in some countries. He could not afford to pay such taxes, so a company like say microsoft could come along and use his code under these laws.
In general, these laws make no sense and would hurt open source developers even more than closed source developers.
Finally, these are in no way analogous to property tax because property tax is just on land, not on the various other things you own. Also the federal government doesn't even collect property tax. It's a stupid idea that would hurt everyone.
A better question is why should we be forced to pay property taxes (rent) on property that we own?
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
First not all property is taxed. you aren't paying property tax on your computer are you? No you are probably if smart taking as a lose if it is a business item. Second with the lose of copyright the amount charged for works will probably increase by a magnitude of order. If I know I can only collect once on my original work before anyone can copy it then I am going to raise the fee I charge. Fees on photography went down after the 1976 copyright changes because photographers where given the rights of there works. So they charged less to sell the rights the first time around because they could make up on other sales after the terms of the initial usage rights lapsed.
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Let's say that a copyright tax might be a good idea, just for sake of discussion. How about a copyright tax of a dollar the first year, two cents the second year, and doubles each year thereafter?
If the idea's good enough to continue generating money, it's worth paying $1024 after ten years, but most ideas aren't. The little guy doesn't get screwed because his copyright only costs a dollar or two. Linux can probably find enough donors to keep their $60k or so copyright, but much like any other piece of software, the Linux community would have to release it into the public domain as well-- if it's good enough for Microsoft or the RIAA, it's good enough for Linux, y'know?
We keep it cheap early on to protect the ideas of inventors/creators. Off the cuff, I think it's probably best to not bother charging the first few years-- it'd cost more than $1 to collect the dollar for the first year, I suspect. Better to simply charge $15 ($8 for the fourth year and $7 in back taxes) the fourth year, which protects the little guy even further and streamlines the process-- back taxes only being owed if you decide it's still worth protecting in year 4, so you could get three years protection effectively for free, so you're not forced to speculate on what's actually worth putting even a dollar's worth of copyright on.
You wouldn't have to pay a property tax since you don't need the fire department to protect it from burning up, nor the police to keep it from being trespassed on or burglarized, nor do you need it cataloged in county maps or on record at the Department of the Interior.
It's the same reason there's no property tax on Second Life land (shhh, don't give politicians ideas)
Instead of having the assesment burden on the owner of the IP, let's put it on the collector of taxes, or the buyer of the IP.
Every idea is assumed to be worth a nominal hundred bucks until the govt tax collecting agency can find a bidder. Once they have a notarized bid ( maybe with some percentage deposit ) then they go to the owner of the IP and inform him that his idea is now worth more than a hundred dollars, and he should start paying more taxes on it.
The IP owner then has two choices: He can assent and start paying the tax, or he can agree to sell it. If he agrees to sell it, the govt collects the money, gives it to the IP owner. They also collect a few percent fee for their services, so that the whole process is fee-based rather than taxpayer-supported.
If the owner of the IP is broke, he need not submit just for financial reasons. The 'notice of value' is a negotiable item, and a bank would be willing to accept it as collateral on a loan - because they can cash it in if the loan defaults. The big corporation would have to be careful about trying to squeeze the little guy, for in doing so, they give him collateral to start a competing business with the IP.
I've lived in states where property taxes were aggressively enforced by municipalities on such varied things as artwork, out-of-state or un-plated vehicles (even if it was never registered or driven on public roads), even office furniture and equipment. In the U.S., sometimes they're administered -- and therefore vary -- at the state level, in other areas it's devolved down to the city/town/county level.
Some states (Florida that I'm aware of specifically) had/have an "intangible personal property" tax, specifically on things like stocks, bonds, bearer notes, money market funds, pretty much anything that's worth anything. Florida's was recently repealed, but it's not like the concept is totally foreign or anything.
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This is a retarded idea put forth by someone who just doesn't like the idea of IP. If you don't like IP, fine, but don't come up with half-baked schemes that twist the meaning of words.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
> Property taxes pay for services that the government provides to land owners...
> but what services does the government provide to IP owners?
The government enforces the monopoly they granted you by using it's monopoly on the 'legitimate' use of force. You would be paying the government to send it's goons against any who violated your copyright.
But copyright ain't property, at least it ain't in the US. Our Constituition only grants Congress the option to pass out copyrights/monopolies to promote science and the useful arts. It they were property, for one thing they wouldn't be 'for limited times.' Property implies moral issues but since Congress could by simple majority vote cease issuing any new ones it can't be a property right. Nope, Copyrights and Patents are just a form of 'Industrial policy' for the creative trades. Same as any other Industrial Policy, Farm Policy, Blah Blah. It can and should be adjusted to get the maximum benefit to those in the industry, the country at large and yes, the federal treasury.
I'd suggest something along the following lines:
No more automatic copyright. Screw Berne. Register it or it doesn't exist. Copyrights would have a registration number assigned and they should be international; something like year-country prefix-number. That would allow people to actually KNOW when a copyright had expired by looking the number up in an online database. As things currently stand you needs lots of research to know if a work is actually in the public domain.
Registering should cost a non-trivial amount and it should vary by some sort of catagory chart. Not fair? Who said it was supposed to be fair, it's Industrial policy remember? Articles and books at low rates, television programs at a higher one and movies at a percentage of gross. Good for three years, renewable. Renewal rates set to discourage hoarding low value content while allowing marketable franchises to be milked a bit. After all, creating something of lasting interest in this short attention span culture should be rewarded. But make each successive renewal more exensive on a log scale. Yes, Disney could keep the mouse for a century but the price for a copyright that long should be expressly punitive.
Democrat delenda est
I think many works have a long lingering value if available through a "long-tail" on-demand system. I can't begin to estimate the lost impulse sales when something ceases to be efficiently available through an old style brick&mortar store. (Forget "It's available on back-order...")
These surges would be driven by someone else's re-promotion of the item. My current vote for the most durable value is books. I nearly created my own anthology of Harlan Ellison's stories back around 1988 because the guy's stories were simply not available. Once someone else beat me to it, his Essential Ellison and White Wolf anthologies sold modestly well or better. All that was done was to refurbish the value to the consumer.
On the nonfiction side, even if the edges of the topic fray over time, a core concept can easily be essential reading for over 50 years. When a random person decides to study X topic, that volume really needs to be available, and not "out of print - too bad."
This has forced me to pre-buy books I know I will need later simply because I am tired of them being pulled off the shelves within a year or two.
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This is quite simple actually. The value is based on the gross revenues (or income) of the company or the person.
So for example:
I make under 100,000 USD per year, I pay $10 per item to be kept as IP.
A Second example:
I make 1,000,000 I pay $1,000 USD per year.
A third example:
I make 35B (Disney COrp) in USD in revenue I would need to pay $200,000 per year per item under IP.
Sony makes 26B last year: 100,000 USD per song and 200,000 per movie
This would make the tax the rich people happy.
And the money would need to be divided between all the states and DC.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Where are the IP appraisers?
There's a good idea lurking in there. Simply shrink copyright term to, say, five years. Allow the purchase of, say, up to twenty-five years of extension, in tranches of up to 3 years. Ramp up the cost so that, you know, year 5 costs x, year 15 costs x^3, and so forth.
I didn't realize we were taxed on all our property, such as my moderately costly computer.
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Some macroeconomist can calculate an optimal number (in fact, I think I've seen an article on this on slashdot). I don't see any straight answers to your question yet so I'll propose something:
$10,000 for works of software or more than five minutes of audio or video. $1,000 for less than five minutes. $100 per year for any amount of passive alphanumeric data or a single still image. $10,000 per year per book or magazine, $100 per year per article or short story.
Prices for this year, and indexed to the CPI for following years. First three years free to allow artists to build a market for their output.
Absolute end of copyright protection in seven years. Works automatically fall into the public domain and are provided to the public in open formats on government servers paid for by the taxes on current content.
This is low enough that honest artists can afford to maintain their works for the full duration, aggregators can still turn a profit, people can pay the tax for vanity's sake. It has a definite terminus so wealthy interests cannot escape their duty to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" nor can artistic works escape being incorporated into the culture as they should be.
For patents the same limits. All patents $10,000 per year. No patents in any way involving software, the presentation of information on computers, or anything even remotely related to same. Given the current pace of technological advance, seven years may be far too long.
One more thing: a new photo of a 13th century drawing is not a "new work" entitled to any protection whatsoever. If the original work would be in the public domain, any reproduction of it would be as well. The same for any "Remix" of audio or "Re-edit" of video. No protection whatever for any recording of a live performance, no protection against "tribute" performance by another artist.
Anyway, that's how I would write it. How about you?
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When I read it , I thought it was going to be about patents, in that case it made sense, but copyright? wtf is wrong with you people? Think of all the free software projects that would required funding after this...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I think many works have a long lingering value if available through a "long-tail" on-demand system.
Sure. I didn't say that the value just stops abruptly, but it diminishes so much that its value as an incentive is minimal. IIRC, the CTEA, which extended copyright terms from life+50/75/100 to life+70/95/120 resulted in an average benefit to the average author of 5 cents. I really doubt that that caused even one more work to be created which otherwise would not have. So the incentivizing effect of copyright doesn't scale proportionately with the scope and length of protection. The cost to the public, OTOH, is more or less constant. For starters, if a work enters the public domain, then rather than having to depend on a monopolist to publish the work, which he might not want to do, if he can't get enough money out of it, anyone and everyone has an opportunity to publish the work, and the competition reduces prices and makes it more likely that the work will be available in one form or another. (See e.g. the many books on Gutenberg or Googlebooks which the original publisher isn't doing anything with, and often, which few other people are doing anything with either)
The long tail is real, it's just usually irrelevant. The thick part of the curve -- the first 90% or so of all possible economic value ever -- is generally enough to incentivize authors, and it is realized pretty rapidly. So why give him more? It doesn't seem to be to anyone's benefit. The author probably won't pursue it (on demand printing or no), no one else has an opportunity, and the work goes out of print.
My current vote for the most durable value is books.
Yeah, but it really depends on the book. Victorian penny-dreadfuls were immensely popular back in their day, but no one reads them now, by and large. The tip-top authors of any given age usually manage to stick around. People still read Dickens, for example. But what was the 10th most popular English book from the year that Oliver Twist was printed? I don't even know, and I bet it's not widely read now. The odds of writing a book that is permanently popular are, as I said, on par with winning the lottery. It happens regularly, but always with someone else.
Frankly, we could probably reduce copyright to a term of, say, 10 years and see virtually no reduction in the number of works created. So we probably should!
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
That idea, I think, would turn a whole lot of Americans off, scented as it is with state appropriation of private property. The better way to do it, for copyrights anyways, is: copyright holders wishing to retain a copyright declare a value to the IRS for tax purposes, whatever they like: $0.02, 1.21 gigadollars, a billion seashells, anything. They pay taxes on that amount. But! When they want to bring a civil case for copyright infringement, that filed value is the maximum amount which they are allowed to collect in restitution. Absolutely nothing else. They can't possibly claim to be overtaxed, since they set their own taxable amount, and on the other hand, they can't claim billions of dollars in "lost sales". The old double-edged sword does wonders for fair play.
It is unequivocally true that the current copyright system is badly broken. However, I am not certain that any of the proposal made, especially in the comment threads, will handle all situations. Consider the following:
As a Professor, one significant component of my job is to do research and write it up for publication. At root, this is a process which involves the production of copyrighted material. I can post my work to a web page somewhere, but that does not really count -- the quality control step of the blind refereeing process is crucial too. This catches any mistakes I may have made and (hopefully) stops people publishing rubbish. Thus, I need to send my work to reputable academic journals. What happens next is where the difficulties arise:
1) If I should pay a fee on my text, when should I pay it? Should it be on the first draft, or on the second, or on the nth? Most serious academic papers go through multiple revisions before they are ready for submission.
2) Should fees (no matter how small) be paid on submission? This too is unworkable. Depending on the journal, it may take over a year to hear back from the referees. Then, of course, it is common for referees to suggest further changes to the paper. It can also take many months for a paper to actually appear.
The problems do not end there, at least, with the current system. Once a paper has received final acceptance, it is common for publishers to require the author (i.e. me) to simply sign over the copyright to them as a condition on publication! This part, at least currently, is utterly mad. After all, as with many academics, I am ultimately employed by tax payers. They have paid for my work. Yet, I apparently initially hold the copyright (universities have not currently caught on to the 'work for hire' scam). However, to get my work out, I have to give it away to a third party who has contributed nothing to its creation.
Finally, to add insult to injury, should anyone (including me, or the tax payers) wish to read my work, then they must pay this third party for the honor! I have papers of my own which I cannot access, because our library does not subscribe to the relevant journals (a subscription can be nearly $1,000 for four issues a year). Of course, in such a crazy system, there are all sorts of dubious back channels (e.g. e-mailing .pdf files, etc.) whereby these restrictions can be got around. However, I hear nothing in any of the proposals made here which could fix such a fundamentally broken system. To make matters worse, the big publishing houses have the cash to lobby the politicians and the lawyers to go after folks (just like the RIAA).
So, in conclusion, if anyone can come up with proposals that could handle this kind of situation, then I will be all ears. Until then, I'll just send out my papers to anyone who asks by e-mail.
Sorry about the rant.
Finally, a solution that scales!
The author clearly does not understand the difference between real and personal property: there's a fundamental difference between intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks) and real property (houses, cars, plasma TVs)
Cars are personal property. Plasma TVs are personal property unless they are attached to the property in which case they would be real property.
No Sigs!
I'm going to ignore patent here. Intellectual property is not all of one kind. I mean here mostly copyright and maybe also trademark, since these are about creativity, not discovery. But the issues are so different that raising them together is confusing.
My first thoughts on this matter went to the nature of real property that allows us to tax it. We don't tax the ownership of a refrigerator. Why should they be different. I have to assume it's that no one is busy making more of it, and so the mere holding of it is a tax on others, who might like to use it. In that sense, if real estate tax can be justified (and I might later argue that it cannot), then the justification is that you're taking up a critical resource from the get go.
In fact, though, copyright is not of that kind. If Gone With The Wind or Cinderella were not created by their respective authors, then those works are just simply not there at all. (You can make whatever claims about a million monkeys you want, but we're not taking more monkeys, we're slaughtering them, and I don't think they'll have the time.) New works of original authorship don't take up space. They are made out of nowhere and every new such work potentially enriches us. So taxing them would be like taxing someone for making new land. If someone could do that (on demand, I mean, not the way we're doing it in the artic with all that melting), I would think twice about taxing it. The making of new land seems a useful skill in a world that is ever more crowded.
While copyrights on newly authored works don't hurt anyone, there is ultimately a cost to the world of allowing one person to continue to hold copyright ownership beyond a reasonable limit, since at some point the world needs to build on what others do.
But the notion that someone should have to pay from the first day of creation for the right to have created that work is the most horrible and regressive tax I could imagine. It would create a ticking clock that would limit the bargaining power of new authors in dealing with publishers, who could afford to outlast the author and just publish the work when it fell into the public domain for non-payment. It would favor the big guy over the little guy. None of that is good.
The middle ground that I might consider would be a tax on long-term extension of copyright. Right now, we continue to extend the copyright term in order to accomplish that. But perhaps a middle ground that says that if Disney wants to extend its rights on a certain work, then it should have to pay heavily for that beyond the reasonable duration of 50 or so years that all authors might reasonably claim to allow them to pursue the use of their works within their own lifetime.
I might even make the claim that real property could use the same protection. If I work my lifetime to buy a property and then at the end of my lifetime lose my job and can't pay the taxes to sustain my ownership, why should I end up with an untaxed refrigerator which I can keep because it's my property, but not a house I can keep? Where is the incentive to work for something that can be taxed away as soon as you own it? I can totally understand a tax on the estate, since my heirs didn't earn the money, and a reasonable argument might be made that they should make their own fortunes. Passing along money to help a young person get started in life, an impoverished person break even in life, or an aging person retire comfortably is one thing, but ensuring that a dynastic fortune consolidates the power for one's progeny is another.
In a sense, the continued use by Disney of intellectual property is the same kind of moral issue. The Disney of today is enriched, perhaps unfairly, by the work of prior generations. Taxing that seems reasonable in a way that is different than taxing you or me fo
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
So far I'm reading that you guys want people to be obligated to declare a value or register a copyright for anything that is currently copyrightable lest it go into public domain. There's too many problems with that, the biggest being that nobody wants to declare their copyrighted items (lest be taxed on it) and the government doesn't want to pay the money to keep track of everyone's crap. All your doing is proposing an increase in the red tape involved in protecting your own ideas.
I'll tell you who. We are. Sure it may not be real property but the fact is that if there were a property tax the added cost to the owner would simply be added onto the cost of the item you are buying. Pretty much making it worse for the consumer.
...There's always the whole part about having to pay ZOMGAZILLION DOLLARS in taxes on the now-astronomical value of the IP. On the whole, it actually sounds like a pretty decent system to me.
There is something to be said for inventing / creating something and having the right to profit from it. The problem with this idea is that you could easily run into a situation where small guy comes up with amazing invention; but in 10 years someone outbids him for it because he doesn't have enough money to pay the taxes on it at the value he really believes it to be worth.. also this auction thing, the owner is just bidding how much "extra tax hes going to pay" where as the "new buyer" has to pay the full amount to the current owner and then pay taxes on it? would i pay myself to keep the thing? or are you suggesting that the government gets to make off with more money for my "property." I paid taxes on it when I bought it, and call me a liberal but I think its utter bull crap for me to have to keep paying tax on it after that. Do you have to pay taxes every year for your computers and clothes and sofas? well why should I pay tax on my X every year just because my X is nicer than yours is
/licensing fees by someone who did a "hostile patent buyout" over you for some IP who used to be paying YOU licensing fees. What I'm supposed to forget something I patented /wrote it and had the rights to it for over 10 years? I think this is a little different from when you invent something at work and your company takes the rights; there its a. expected and b. pretty much what they are paying you for in a way in the first place.
example? the barry bonds record breaking ball was sold because the guy who caught it couldnt afford the taxes that he would have had to pay to keep it. after all the ball isnt really "worth" anything until it is sold. it doesnt exactly pay him dividend balls every day. This isn't quite as true for IP, they at least pay dividends... if the technology catches on fast enough. Software patents only have a 17 year life to begin with. seems short enough to me.. copyrights on the other hand
Also I think its pretty absurd that you could be sued for infringement
For copyright it does present a little bit more of an interesting situation.. but they already can be bought and sold. you want something make the person in offer. It seems to break someone's rights to personal property by forcibly reauctioning off their possessions. If the analogy is to make it more like "physical property" than you shouldn't be including an action that would probably be ruled unconstitutional towards personal property... the only group who gets to steal like that is the government, and the method is called eminant domain and thats bad enough already
think about it, with this example scenario:
bob buys a limited edition widget in 1990 when it comes out because a he likes it and he thinks it might be worth something someday fast forward 30 years later when bob's widget is in short supply because most have been destoryed or consumed. bob loves his widget but he's just a middle class guy who makes 70k a year. Donald, a wealthy multimillionare finds out the bob has one of the few remaining 1990LEW's that still is in good condition.. Donald makes an offer to Bob for it for several million dollars; which is more than Bob paid for it, and more than Bob is actually worth (Widget aside). Bob says no I don't want you money I like my widget just fine and I won't sell it for any price. Donald says hmm I don't like this I want your crap now. Donald cries to lobbyists and his local government until they decide that they will forcibly reauction off bob's widget. donald who has much more money than bob out bids him, and gives the money he bid to bob, and drives off with his car. bob's pissed because he poured his time effort and care into that car for years for him to enjoy, not for some rich guy to steal for him.
yes its trite and its not ip, but the point is if that hap'd i'd bet you bob would find a lawyer and go up a level courtwise to challenge the constitutionality of that... and when you try changing it for ip the problem will be that people with a l
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
and a President that's hell-bent on cutting any tax he can pronounce the name of
If that were true, there would not have been any tax cuts in the past 7 years.
paintball
It's great, except for the fact that there are, literally, hundreds of millions worth of people who hold copyrights on an essentially infinite number of things, and that this system would a) require that each and every one of these things be declared and a value given or immediate release to the public be made on everything from term papers (most students retain the rights to these, although many schools place contractual restrictions on them) to snapshots to grocery lists, and that the sheer apparatus for actual enforcement is completely unmanageable and b) completely destroy self and independent-publishers for all media, forcing them to either pay taxes they cannot afford or sell IP that they have sunk a great deal of effort and time into that they must completely leave behind (imagine the harm that could be done to a writer who uses regular characters in multiple stories!) even before it may have come into its full value.
It's a good idea, just completely unworkable and FAR more hurtful to minor copyright holders who typically don't cause problems anyway than to the big guys who are the intended targets.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Time was I might have opposed the asset taxation of a patent held by the original inventor. However, now that "non-obviousness to those skilled in the art" has been degraded to mean "non-obvious to people pretending to be skilled in the art", the patent system has become dysfunctional and there is no good reason to treat it as a natural right of the inventor.
Here's what I mean by "natural right of the inventor":
Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
* The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
* The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
* The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
* Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20 arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.
Assessments should be of the liquidation value of the assets ("liquidation value in place"). The owner can force the government to purchase his asset at the assessed value. The liquidation value can be set by the simple expedient of letting anyone place a bid on an asset by putting the amount bid in an escrow account with the Treasury, at the risk free interest rate (historically the interest rate on short term US treasury instruments), this being the basis for Modern Portfolio theory. Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the same rate.
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.
Seastead this.
This is unconstitutional. Too bad so many people are unable to comprehend the constitution.
If the red stapler is property, where is the property tax? For that matter, why don't we all subject ourselves to a quarterly inventory of all our posessions, fill out form J-stroke-zed 45, and send it to the ministry of information?
Will those attempting to fight the injustices associated with the current IP laws please focus on the unjust aspects of them, not all IP laws. Also, please not cause an even worse problem? pretty please? Pretty, pretty, please? Thanks.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So if $megaCorp sues someone for patent or copyright infringement, they will be taxed on the same value that they use for calculating damages.
This is sounding better all the time! So what you are really talking about is buying "IP theft coverage" from the government. They can elect to pay less, but they get less coverage. That actually starts to make sense. The whole point of Copyright is that the government grants limited monopoly protection as an incentive to create/produce. Once that incentive is no longer meaningful, the transaction ends and the nominal value of the IP goes to zero.
The thing to figure out would be what the starting "coverage" would be and how long until they have to pay for it. If I have just written a book, I might not be able to afford enough coverage at the exact point "theft" is most damaging. I think it makes sense to give someone a certain coverage minimum for a *very short* amount of time (e.g. in the neighborhood of or less than the original copyright term of seven years).
It's Trespassing.
This already exists. Patents are one form of intellectual property and they require renewal fees to be paid or they lapse before the 20 years are over.
The only reason there is an industry for non-tangible goods like recorded music and art is because someone is willing to exchange money/goods/services for them! The instant that happened - the instant the music or art was found to be as valuable as some amount of money or some good or some service - an industry developed. Why wasn't there an industry for caveman paintings? I don't really know, maybe there was. But if there wasn't, it's probably because those paintings were not found to be valuable enough to warrant an exchange of other goods or services. Said caveman painter needed a "day job" to support himself and did his paintings in his spare time.
[snip] Strongly disagree. People payed for scarcity, not the music. People bought records because recordings were hard to make once and are not now. People payed for big media because they were talent scouts, paying for the service of finding and producing previously unknown artists (the rare "next big thing"). People payed for personal, live performances and still do because they are scarce. People buy original canvas paintings (as opposed to reproductions) for the same reason. Cavemen painters might have received some value from the community if the skill and medium was considered rare and special enough, but they probably did not have a registry or prevent people from copying motifs from one cave to another. Throughout history, artists have traveled from gig to gig working for room and board or maybe some extra and some have worked under great patrons. Art existed.Today, people learn to play instruments and participate in church choirs or other functions with no expectation of payment because they think it makes their life better. In many cases, that is enough. Many artists, and most of the good ones I think, perform because they need to, because they would not imagine life without art. That has nothing to do with "property". Making money as an artist is great if you can do it, but there is no necessary relation.
Intellectual Property is actually property
Well, fellas, here's a new example of how newspeak can transform the world. I'm sure many of you remember those endless discussions about how the term "intellectual property" is flawed, in that it tries to mean too much for too many people at the same time and those who want can fit it to mean practically any subset of the terms "IP" can be applied to in a general form. And now, someone pops up and makes a deduction from this name, that will be correct if only taken the term itself in consideration, but being as inherently flawed as the term itself in the broader context. There have been some examples for such moves during our known history, when a word, a concept, a term has been misused so cleverly for a longer period that in the end they managed to change the conceived meaning of those words among the people. Yes, I know I'm being also too broad here, but this is the first thing that popped into my mind (well, the second, since the actual first was something like "hehh") when reading the above quote.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
There's pages and pages of Re:Wow above this comment and wow is about right. All that talk about auctions and valuing and ownership and it's all just wasted space.
Here's all you need to know:In the US at least, business inventory is exempt from property taxes. That's it, that's the end of it. No taxes on IP that businesses own. That's the answer to the article's question: "because it isn't taxable property." It's mostly land and buildings and that's it. The same goes for personal property. When was the last time you paid property tax on your computer that probably is worth a decent amount of money? Or even your car? Not all physical property is taxed so why would anyone assume that IP would or should ever be? That's the least likely to be taxed!!! The whole article is just stupid. If the government taxed all property, they'd destroy the economy so they don't.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Repeat after me: you don't have to declare the "true value of your assets", which is an entirely imaginary notion, except in the tax year when you have *realized* capital gains *by selling the asset*. Lets say that four friends and I get together to form the Pasty-Faced White Guy Boy Band. We write our single "I Cheated On You But Now I'm Sorry Please Take Me Back". It costs us nothing to write, so the cost basis on that song's copyright and associated IP is zero. We perform it for a while, and release it to the Internets, to the adoration of millions of spurned women everywhere. I receive an offer from Big Record Company to purchase the rights to the song, in perpetuity, for $1 million dollars. I reject it.
Where do I put the million dollars on my tax return? Nowhere. No income means no income tax.
Now, had I accepted the offer, I would have realized capital gains of $1 million (probably split five ways), less the $0 cost basis in ICOYBNISPTMB. That would require me paying taxes -- likely at the long term capital gains rate, not as income, in the most plausible reading of my imaginary scenario.
Now, let's say that I reject the $1 million offer, and then subsequently sell to Timmy The Two Bit for $50,000 to prevent the bank from kicking me out of my house. In this case, despite the fact that you might feel my song is still worth $1 million, I would be assessed taxes on only $50,000 of capital gains. Even if the song made me a million in sales in the month before the sale, it would still be *fairly valued* at $50,000 after the sale actually takes place, assuming I am not engaging in tax fraud outside the scope of this hypothetical (for example, by doing a transaction which is not at "arms length" -- perhaps selling to a confederate with the promise to buy back in the next tax year and benefit somehow from a stepped up cost basis).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I'm not so sure this would be possible. I admit I haven't examined the issue in great detail, but it would seem to violate the terms of the proposed 'system'. More specifically, it allows for the existence of IP that is not itself taxed. However, it might be possible in a static form.
Flip it around. You are not taxing the idea, but the monopoly on the idea. A future buyer could not renege on previous grants. They could use their new rights to do new things, like put the GPL code into their own closed source product, but they could not void the old license for people who are already bound to it. As well, if someone created a derivative of that code and distributed it, the new owner would have to comply with the GPL to us it, even though they owned the underlying copyright. Just like, if a copyright is put into the public domain, it does not mean that your license to use it is gone, but rather unnecessary.[snip]
What you want to tax is the government enforcement of the copyright. The taxpayers supply a goonsquad to enforce that IP. That is what you are paying for, not the idea itself.
It boggles my mind that folks think they can come up with any system of copyright law in which your generic starving artist will be treated as equitably as Disney is. Disney has the multi-billion dollar warchest to make sure any process you require, any form you mandate, any hoop you establish, will be accomplished exactly as the law dictates. They will happily offer to write the law to make this easier. Your generic starving artist is likely too busy waiting tables to remember to file his IP13-I in a timely fashion on the 37th week in the 14th monsoon season after the IP creation. ("Darn, I was sure if we made it that hard, Disney would forget to file their form for Mickey!")
All you'll do is create a very inegalitarian world: one in which those with the most access to the techniques of *manipulating the copyright system* end up with IP, and one in which no other creators end up with anything. It will have absolutely nothing to do with importance of the created works, skill or effort involved in creating them, or any subject of social concern except to the extent that those immediately translated into money to be burned to satisfy the regulatory gods. (And you non-creators will get to freeload a bit, yay. Not on Windows or Mickey, though -- you'll be freeloading on the backs of the little guy. Microsoft and Disney will also happily freeload off the backs of the little guy, when the little guy actually comes up with something worth stealing, which will be about as seldom as it is in the status quo. They'll use your new copyright tax like Pfizer used New London's power of eminent domain -- to accomplish theft under the color of law.)
The current copyright regime has its issues, granted. However, it has some nice features: you know how many bureacracies I had to ask for permission to write software and start selling it? None. I wrote it, I put it up on the Internet, money started coming in, the following April I sent an extra large check to the IRS. This system protects the incentive for me to actually write the software. Without me writing it my customers would still be stuck with the grossly inferior solutions they had to use before. Folks who aren't my customers might not benefit as much as they would if you could requisition the fruits my labor for nothing but, hey, it was a boring program to write and I wouldn't have written it without the prospect of compensation.
(P.S. The software, which I sold about ~$10k worth of last year, makes educational bingo cards. It is about 2k lines of code. If the very notion of this offends you, there is an OSS project on Sourceforge called bingo-cards which is my direct competitor. It is currently broken -- doesn't run on Windows, can't actually print cards, etc.
I'm sure many Slashdotters think that, in a world without copyright to protect profits, there would still be a socially optimum level of IP creation. Well, it seems to me that the socially optimum level of IP creation includes some way for teachers to print bigno cards. If you think software copyrights are invidious, I think you probably owe society a patch to bingo-cards. It can't be that hard. Let me know how it goes.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Because the GPL isn't enforced with a monetary fine, it's enforced by making the person using it to obey the license.
This is also an advantage for giving an "EULA" that gives ADDITIONAL rights rather than taking your rights away: if it gives you additional rights, there's no need to do anything other than deny those rights to hurt the abuser. If it's taking rights away, you have no recourse to take rights away if they decide they don't want to stop doing that. You HAVE to get them to pony up cash for the issue.
And then you base it off the "IP" property valuation. Say no more than 10% and if the costs are taken to 100%, the cource and application are given away (it's already been paid over and over again, unless EVERYONE has been "stealing" it, which means that the license used is an anathema to the public).
According to xe.com: $0.02 = £0.0100373.
So the dollar rate for toughts is actually a bargain, but maybe they don't include VAT in the figure?
There doesn't have to be any IP law and without that, all you have is someone who stole a physical piece of property. You are also paying for the government making a valuation of how much you're allowed to exort both in pricing your monopoly product and for damages when the rights are abused.
THAT is what you're paying for.
And you can either ask for cash or obedience of basic copyright law (which for an OS would mean that you can only have one installed copy but it doesn't tie to one machine alone) or for some fraction up to the property tax level. If you assess its worth at $0 you can ONLY ask for obedience of basic copyright.
If someone steals your car, you can get your car back. You can't get money for "misuse of car" off them. They will also be done for criminal charges. Aren't copyright laws becoming criminal...?
So how much did one copy of the CD cost you? Nil if the person abusing copyright did the copy themselves. So you can ask for Nil dollars. And trying to get criminal charges won't help because there has to be a police investigation from the off. That aint gonna happen.
The problem with a "copyright tax" is very simple: According to current international copyright laws, you don't have to register, anything you create is (C) you.
Which means this posting is (C) by me. How much tax do you want to leverage on it? And how much tax will you ask for the private love letters that I write, and that are also (C) by me but only two persons will probably ever see them?
You can make this work for patents and trademarks, because they are registered. But not copyrights.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The first year it costs a penny, the second it's two cents, then 4, 8... Just double it each year.
It takes 7 years just to owe a dollar! Who could complain about that??
so, it's a tax that is specifically designed to put commercial software entities out of business on behalf of open source software.
Is this how desperate the open source community has gotten? I mean, we're already giving away the software for *free*, but that isn't working, so now you think we should just hijack the government and use it to enforce open source on the industry via taxation of anything that isn't open source?
Or are we going to tax the value of open source software as well and destroy not just commercial, but all software development?
Sometimes I listen to people talk, and I get the impression that they are broken. Sound comes out, but there's no rational thought behind it. Would people please stop posting stuff like this? It makes me lose faith in humanity.
There's no property tax on "IP" because there's no such thing as intellectual property.
(Well, there's already been a flood of posts on this one, but anyways .... )
[1] FWIW I think the idea of a copyright tax is a good one, for the sake of making commerically unimportant copyrights available.
[2] The tax doesn't have to be a big one to be effective, and any realistic tax would have to be on a uniform basis and a reasonable level to be administratively workable. Patent renewal fees already exist and are like that, and they do result in many patents being abandoned to the public domain before their term is up.
[3] An additional advantage of a copyright tax would be that in the case of items that might look like 'abandonware' but are not, the tax register would help people's efforts to find the person claiming the copyright, if they want to fix up any kind of proper licensing permission.
[4] A big difficulty in the way of implementation, is that copyright law conditions are now set by international treaty, the Berne Convention. This says that copyright has to be available without formality. So it isn't any longer up to Congress just to alter the law, unless they also want to leave (denounce) the Berne Convention (this would result in lack of mutuality of copyright protection between the US and just about every other country, an inconvenience and cause of loss and expense to copyright holders that caused the US to join the Convention in the first place.)
So, international negotiations would be needed to insert some kind of 'sunset' clause into the Berne Convention. Or else, the tax could perhaps be brought in for some other effect, short of ending the copyright, like maybe avoiding a presumption of licensing-as-of-right: this could be legislatively created for untaxed copyright works. (But I'm not sure that even that would be compatible with the existing Berne Convention anyway.)
[5] So, all in all, the idea sounds good, but is probably impractical until the international climate (in which the US govt currently has a big influence) moves away from the tendency to tighten IP nooses, and starts loosening up.
-wb-
your MP3 player is property too !!!
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
Outfits like Disney can afford to buy and maintain properties on spec. Hold them in storage for decades if necessary, until the story and production problems are solved. Fifty years for The Chronicles of Narnia.
I think this is probably the most reasonable course - in the US it takes about $4K (before lawyers) to register a patent properly, and it can cost as much as 20K to get the full 20 year run out of a patent. Now given that the work that goes into most patented ideas is much greater than what goes into a copyrighted piece, why is the copyright free & lifelong, while the patent is 20 years max & expensive? Are things like Oops I did it again actually of such cultural value that we must ensure that the artists grandchildren are guaranteed income while items such as the heart lung machine are of much more limited value?
I don't object to a free copyright period of say 7 years, tax scale for 7 year extensions. At each renewal period, you pay based on either the 7 year aggregate income or half of the highest previous aggregate income. This ensures that those items which had a high cultural relevance (major works which influenced culture) become available sooner as it's more expensive to maintain them than piddling works that never sold well.
This structure provides for the protection of the creators, but only so long as they are willing to pay to maintain that protection. At the same time, it ensures that the vast majority of works that are not actually of any significant financial value are released back to the public domain where they belong.
Your idea comes close, but: why not chancel copyright all together and create a new branch for patents instead? A registration fee up front, it would be checked weather the idea is new (nobody could earn anything on cover songs any more, and performers would only get payed for what they do: perform, not CD sales). Then an anual fee for the time You like to keep the "patent", but no more than 25(?) years. Disney would have to think of something new, publish or perish. And whoever does not want to get revenue from their creation, can just choose not to patent it.
The author is quite right that there should be a carrying cost to copyrights and patents. But take it one step farther: Make the annual registration fee a percentage of an owner-declared total value; then give the public the option to buy out the owner by paying that total value.
For example, I declare my novel to be worth $100,000. My registration fee that year will be $2000 (I'm just using 2% as an example). But at any time during that year, anyone can come along and pay me $100,000 to liberate the work into the public domain, as a mandatory transaction. I've declared the price, so it's a fair price by definition. Each year at re-registration time, I can change that total value, moving it either up or down, to reflect changes in the market value of my work. But having done so, I'm obligated to allow liberation for the declared price at any given time.
Note that this transaction is not a sale of the copyright or patent, it's a liberation. Sales can still take place, as before, and a private sale could be for more or less than the declared public value (because the buyer might want to preserve the monopoly, rather than liberate the work). All the market dynamics that copyrights and patents formerly had, they would still have.
This proposal is described in more detail in http://www.questioncopyright.org/balanced_buyout/
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
Under the scheme proposed by the parent, MegaCorp could easily outbid J. Random Inventor for his own ideas.
For the love of all that's good in the world! Do not give the government ideas on more ways to tax us!
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
MO taxes personal property.
Tags for cars
Reg for snowmobile
Tags for motorcycle
These could all be personal property tax
Tax on the whole estate when you die, that is on personal property
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
No!!!!! That's not true! That's IMPOSSIBLE!
Too bad property taxes in and of themselves are already a horrid affront to anyone that owns anything. Unless of course I'm the only one in the world that hates having to essentially pay rent on my own property (several hundred dollars a year is cheap even, when compared!) or have it taken away by the government for no good reason. Fixing one bad problem by applying another isn't necessarily a great solution.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
If you don't use it, you lose it.
As a muscle, or the brain, if you don't use it, you lose it. if IP is abandoned by a company, it most be losed by the company and moved to public domain (after few years). Examples: MS-DOS, Windows 95-Me, Windows NT, Atari consoles, Apple II, Hayes Smartmodem, etc.
While this is a fascinating article, I certainly have to disagree with a couple of the statements that have been made (and comment on something I read in the forums).
First off, a creating a copyrighted work does NOT cost nothing. The book I'm working on right now (the World War I account of my great grandfather, who served in the Imperial Russian cavalry) has so far cost around $200 in research materials alone, with another $50 set aside for a book that's coming in soon, as well as around 10 months of my part-time time in research and writing - and I'm only in the first 60 manuscript pages. My projected completion time is now standing at around a year and a half total.
The last book I worked on, which ended up being the launching book of my new publishing company, was around two years of work for me, and fifteen for my collaborator. Price that time out, and you're in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Second, copyright IS taxed, in two ways (at least in my country, which is Canada). First, there is the copyright registration, which is a requirement if you ever want to actually defend your copyright in court (while a copyright technically exists upon creation of the work, you have to register the copyright to prove that it's yours). Second, if you make money off your copyrighted material, there is an income tax on it.
I really wish the RIAA would just die already. I can't count the number of times I've come across people thinking that copyright is a sort of eternal welfare cheque for writers (it isn't - the work has to be profitable for royalties to even appear, and even then you've got to be pretty well established to make more than the minimum wage for your efforts), or that it is a weapon to remove competition (sadly, that one has merit when it comes to the US Patent Office, which is very badly broken from what I've read, but no merit when it comes to copyright - you can't copyright an idea, only the exact implementation of it). And all of those misconceptions come from the actions of the RIAA. Even worse, thanks to the RIAA's legal BS, the idea that we would all be better off without copyright is starting to become an ideology, and that can be very dangerous in the long run.
(Explanation on that last point - the most important thing copyright does has nothing whatsoever to do with the customer. Seriously. What copyright actually does is provide a legal framework that allows creative artists, their publisher/distributor, and other distributors to interact together in a way where nobody gets shafted. Remove that framework, and it becomes a lot harder to get work out there, as all of a sudden the submission process itself has no safety net to keep your work from being stolen out from under you before it ever gets published.)
And finally, on property like desks being taxed by the state (outside of a sales tax, I'm guessing)...um, wow. Just...wow. That actually leaves me speechless. How the hell did they get away with something like that?
PS: Life plus 50/70 is not infinite copyright. By definition, if there is a number, it isn't infinite. Just because YOU may not see the work move into the public domain, doesn't mean it won't. And plenty of material moves into the public domain each year.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Assign a low fixed taxable value to it in year one. Say, $10. Every year, that value goes up by 50%. The idea is that the longer your intellectual property is exclusively yours, the more it's costing everyone else to not have access to that property (and the longer you've had to capitalize on it).
So, after 10 years its taxable value would be ($10 x 1.5^10 =) $384, which is not too unreasonable. If you think your intellectual property is worth $384 after ten years, you pay the property tax on it and move on. After 30 years, its taxable value is a little over a million dollars. After 40 years, $74 million, etc.
If that doesn't increase the taxable value fast enough, either increase the initial value of the IP or increase the factor.
If you taxed per item of work, then anyone wanting to game the system would merely string as many works together to minimize their tax burden. A movie studio would say that every movie they made in a year was all part of one big movie whose parts were merely shown in seperate viewings.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Property is a bundle of rights. Each right is like a stick in a bundle. You have the right to control of the use of the property, the right to benefit from your property, the right to transfer or sell your property and the right to exclude others from your property, among other rights. However, that these rights don't include the right to interfere with other people's property rights or use your property in a way that interferes with public health, safety or convenience. Furthermore, there are the rights of possession (when you are actually in physical possession of property) and rights by title (when you physically aren't there).
Your premise that property means that "it is yours, and no one can take it from you" is patently false. The government can take away your land for public use so long as they provide you with just compensation. A private party can take your property by adverse possession if they meet certain requirements for a long period of time. Property can be taken away as a punishment for a crime or as compensation in a civil lawsuit or as a matter of contract law.
Furthermore, your wrong that property taxes aren't made on the items you list. The power to tax property has always been retained by the States. Your use of property can also be taxed. Some States actually tax industrial equipment. States will tax bank accounts as property under certain circumstances. Some kinds of debt can be taxed.
These rights are part of a social contract enshrined in our constitution and the law, which is made by our elected representatives. You can't just proclaim a new libertarian theory of property and expect people to abide by your twisted logic.
It is very simple. You declare what your IP is worth, you pay some sort of tax on that value. If your IP is violated, the maximum damages you could be awarded could not exceed your declared value. The more protection you want, the more you pay for it.
When Disney sells a Micky Mouse item, they get taxed for the revenue.
Taxing IP that isn't making a profit fails 99% of copyright holers,a nd becomes a minot inconvience, and a big tool for large corporate holders.
Limiting IP is a good idea.
Copyright should be good for 7 years, a minro renewl for 7 more, a very large fee($5M to start) for another 7 years, then it goes into public domain.
The reason the second 7 years is a minor fee(500 bucks or so) is that a lot of authors may spend 4-5 years on a book. So if they completed it that still ahve some protection. Also, All IP should only be allowed to the creator of the work, and should never be allowed to assigned to any other entity excusivly.
This prevents publishers from letting a good book sit on a desk until 14 years goes buy, and then publishing it. Right now it is considered 'bad' to shop around for the best deal in any logical manner. For example, A writed can't just send there work to all publisher at once. It's considered bad manners.
Of course, they're being tricked by the publishing companies so they get as little money as possible.
One last thing: when talking about IP, please remember that very few people develop anything in a bubble. Writers go to writers group, inventors talk to other inventors. This is why getting Copyright upon penning the work is needed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So I see in the sidebar "Compare prices on YRO products". Curious, I clicked the link and get a page trying to sell tv sets. Does this have some deep meaning I'm missing?
Someone else who saw the potential could have stepped in, linked it to all the right sites, and took all the advertising revenue for themselves.
This would be almost as wrong as leasing an operating system to IBM for a large amount of money, then buying the previously leased operating system from a third party for a much smaller amount of money. Or maybe it would just be good business sense.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Imagine a poor author who's living on Baked Beans on toast, without two pennies to rub together.
He's finally finished his manuscript, and it's a masterpiece.He can't register it, because he's got no money.
He asks a publisher for the registration fee.
The publisher asks to see the manuscript.
The writer's dilemma: if he shows it to the publisher, they could legally take it and print it without paying him (it's unregistered, remember); if he doesn't show it to the publisher, he'll never have the money to register or publish.
This is pretty much the problem that IP laws were written to solve in the first place! The bathwater is undoubtedly dirty, but don't throw the baby out along with it...
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
First off, are companies not taxed on whatever income their IP brings them? Does a factory pay tax on the machinery it owns? Or just on whatever revenue the products that the machinery creates bring in?
Furthermore, the "real" in "real estate" has nothing to do with the property not being "fake", as I believe the author thinks. "Real Property" is "real" as in "royal." It is named thus because originally in Europe (from where our system of law originates), all land was owned by the crown. "Real Property" specifically refers to land, and only land. Not ideas.
IP couldn't be farther from real property. This is quite a stretch!
since it's not real property, it must lie on the y-axis of the complex plane;-)
Good point. How about a simple exception for GPL, or perhaps creating a different class of non-profit copyright?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No. The GPL, for instance, uses it as a big stick to make sure that people "play fair" -- i.e., you can use my code, but only if you let us use your code. Furthermore, composers have used it to make sure that their songs aren't just played, but played *well*, and artists have used it to demand things like artistic integrity.
What whould happen to the Free Software movement if such a law were put in place? If people couldn't afford to maintian copyrights on the code, the GPL would effectively be BSD-after-N-years (where N is the number of years you can keep your IP for free).
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
(Note: lower-casing of "i" intentional.... i am coming to the believe that the importance of the 'i' is woefully overrated, and there should be a movement to deprecate the importance of "I" to "i", and maybe even deprecate many other so-called "proper nouns". Anyway, on with the comment...)
Why even SELL in the first place? Why not create the technology or idea or product and license it under some "for-lease-available-but-no-sale-available" protection?
Why does EVERYthing seem to have to be "for sale" when it comes to exchange or transfer or change in ownership rights? Wait, i think i know why. It's because the new owners want to freeze out the originator in case the value goes up. Greedy-assed assumers of property just have very little capacity to reward a TRUE inventor or originator of something.
But, a flaw in my idea is that co-owership could be corrupted, as is the case with recording artists screwed by many recording labels. If, say, i invent the next doo-dad that is an instant hit and is valued at $500 millions, and i sell it and get $300 thousands post-tax, i'd be a fool. So, i should pursue a tiered performance arrangement. New owner NEVER cuts me out. i get some amount of cash up front, plus a percentage of gross OR net... my choice, renewable every quarter that income statements are closed.
Problem is, creative accounting accountants and Enron-like executives will find a tricky-dick way to report one set of numbers to wall street, and another to the pain-in-their-ass-leeches-original-inventors who they want to pay as little as possible.
So, the SMART inventors do what the Google and other people did: create a company, stick with it, and don't get bought out. Ride that valuation/market cap wave, and keep innovating or, umm, buying up newer, smaller, more nimble companies to keep the microsofts at bay.
But, taxing intellectual property of small inventors who often can barely afford the copyright and maybe a patent FILING APPLICATION (and not even finish the entire process, due to costs) is just about very close to heinous. If i've created things that *might* turn into a hit, why should i face a hostile takeover just because a lien or foreclosure is place on my invention because of inability to pay or failure to pay for a tax for which i might not agree?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
So you establish a reasonable period of monopoly that's tax-free. Say, for the first 5 or 7 or even 10 years a copyright is tax-free. The entrepreneur then has a reasonable window to derive value at no cost, but corporations still cannot exploit the system forever for zero cost.
The problems in patent and copyright law, while they may seem similar, are actually quite different. I agree that a patent tax would likely cause more problems than it solves. But copyright is a different animal. Copyright law doesn't have broad coverage, trolls or rewards for gaming the system -- not until you hit the megacorp level and game the system via lobbyists.
The biggest problem in copyright law is simply that copyright terms are far, far too long.
The real drawback to TFA's proposal is that it gives permission to megacorps to hold copyright in perpetuity, so long as they kick back some cash to Uncle Sam. Under the proposed scheme, Mickey Mouse will -never- fall into the public domain.
Now, I don't have a very optimistic view that lobbying won't manage such perpetual copyright -anyway-. But that doesn't mean I'm comfortable in embracing it up-front, just because Washington would get a taste.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
How about this... simply weight the scales depending on the source of the creation/owner of the IP..
People (that is individuals) get one timeframe for IP coverage.. say 25 or 50yrs from original IP creation date.
Corporations/Business (ie, NOT people) get a much shorter timeframe.. say 10 years from original IP creation date
If an IP is sole/resold it does not get extended coverage. It continues to live out its ORIGINAL timeline. Ex: a person creates IP then 8 years later sells to a corporation, the Corporation only gets 2 years of use as it was originally created.
As for extentions, eh maybe. But again on a weighted scale favoring individuals, not corporate entities. IP should be protected to the intelectual whom created it, not a non-intilectual entity... A company thinks/creates nothing, its people do.
And for corporations who would say that 10 years is too short, they always have the option of having the IP licensed under the Original creator (aka, the Employee) and not for the corporation.. then they could get 50 years 'lowned coverage' in a way.. Of course, that employee now OWNES the IP completely (say Mickey Mouse) and could leave, sell, charge the company if they wanted... so better keep them happy.
So a company who employes bright people to create IP has the option to force all IP discoveries/creations to the company (and get 10 years coverage) or can opt to let the employee keep the rights and have the company license/use it. Risk / reward scenario
But this solution would force IP into the public domain and still give the little guy (ie, Individuals) the ability to compete with big corporations.
Something EXTREME? Like hanging certain of the lobbyist, corrupt case judges, and placing bounties on the wretched of the CEO's who've taking uncouth advantage of the broken patent system.
What we need is to change the system (by hook or crook to get things jumpstarted) by nullifying dubious patents, plunging the purported value into chaos.
Also, change the system by saying SIMULTANEOUS/PLURAL, MULTI-PARTY INVENTION IS PERMITTED. Let the product success in the market be determined by actual consumer purchases, not purported road maps of envisioned market cap and market penetration.
The US patent system is WHOLLY corrupted by big interests and wholly undeserving of an existence or right to issue rights to a patent based on tweaked mods. As mentioned before, most awarded patents are just work-around to defeat (by need or by greed) an existing patent.
So, i believe that it should be OK for someone to invent something and then if not wealthy enough to take it to market, still be allowed patent protection. This forces others to become inventive, ingenious, or the like. If their product truly IS deserving of a patent, the market will validate it. Superior products should survive on their WORTHINESS in the EYES of PURCHASERS, not by sheer dint of a patent number and certificate.
Just look at the Blackboard vs Desire2Learn case. A decent CRM, Google or Slashdot engine, an easy-to-use front end of a relational or object database, and some data protocols and good old-fashioned teacher-inspired/utilized grading systems and multi-industry scheduling and process management (BOMS - such as Agile come to mind....as do things like MINTO, etc...)
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/570552.html
http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aaadje.htm
Treat scheduled classes as products with a life cycle, value, as having parts (students, faculty, staff, etc...) and propagate it among users local and remote, and you INSTANTLY can kick off the patent table all sorts of products. Even without pursuing one's own patent, the mere assemblage and tweaking of products could be the perfect end-run around products UNWORTHY of a patent. Just charge for installation, service, maintenance, and upgrading.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The problem of our patent system is that those companies with deep enough pockets for a well staffed legal department can currently obtain patents almost without regard to prior art or their obviousness. Once they have a big and broad enough patent portfolio, they can use that stick effectively against competitors who don't have similarly deep pockets.
Occasionally, there's a minor scuffle among competitors at the same tier, but that's much more unusual, there's a lot in the way of informal truces out there, because an outright patent war between, say, IBM and Microsoft would last decades and cost each company very, very dearly.
Adding a property tax on intellectual property would pull some profits away from companies with such portfolios, but wouldn't change the fundamental problem that deep pockets and a big portfolio of broad patents = protection against competitors. The IP bidding war by itself, or as a means to determine the taxable amount is interesting but just compounds the basic problem by transfering to likely even deeper pockets. If the bid is to bring the patent into the open, those bids arehandicapped by the simple fact that monopolies are far more profitable... the only patent this brings into the open are ripped from the hands of those without deep pockets by those with deep pockets, so while it's nice to see things go into the open, it's hard to argue that creates a more competitive landscape overall.
The central problem of our patent system is not that the short term monopoly as compensation for having the idea is such a bad way to do things (you should compensate for the idea in a way that bears some relation to its worth), it's that bad patents are being granted in the first place. Once the bad patents are out there, whether the bidding war is legal staff or directly on the patent, and regardless of whether there's a tax on the idea or not, the system will always favor those will already deep pockets to the detriment of their competitors and society at large.
From my perspective this is worse than, say, downloading an episode of Lost from thepiratebay because the content market today is a very few to many relationship - the many can easily resolve back to the few and it is only the few who can afford to protect their copyright identity.
I'm interested in a flatter entertainment market, and that can only come around when the Chocolate Rain kid can compete on equal ground with the established media players, based upon a quality metric of (taste nonewithstanding) end-user views, or similar.
I use youtube as an example only because it:
- Has proved that it can track popular content.
- Has mechanisms for dealing with copyright infringement.
- Is able to distribute advertising revenue to fund both grassroots and established media entities.
In this context, I think how well copyright worked in or before 1978 is quite irrelevant. How better to work in the public favour by giving them more of what they want, rather than which tidbits boardroom executives decide to toss? We are in the process of building a future where we won't have networks which fans of canceled shows can bombard with their nuts, but we can only do that if the little guy is able to retain copyright and thus compete on an equal footing.The copyright proposal you advocate will only create a barrier to entry and thus prevent this from occurring.
This would be more like the old personal property tax (NOT like property tax that applies to real estate). Example: I gather it's no longer enforced, but used to be in Montana there was an annual tax form where you had to declare the value of your furniture, clothing, appliances, etc., then pay a percentage of that value as tax. (It was perhaps the most hated of all taxes!)
So if the RIAA affiliate claim their IP has a value of X, they would have to pay some small percentage of X as an annual property tax, which would itself fluctuate with the owner-stated value of said IP.
Now, where this becomes interesting to P2P cases, is where some IP is no longer generating income, so they've assigned it an extrememly minimal or zero value, to minimize or eliminate the associated property tax. It'd be tough to convince a judge and jury that you deserve a $100k judgment if you've previously assigned that IP a taxable value of $10, or worse, of $0.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The GPL isn't enforceable except by the copyright holders. If those copyright holders don't pay the proposed maintenance tax, then their copyrights would expire, and their GPL'd "IP" would lapse into the public domain. Furthermore, corporations could pay the tax on their additions and bug fixes, and thus "lock up" their versions of the formerly GPL'd software.
This system would just lock down more IP in big corporations: they can afford the annual fees to protect their property into perpetuity, but now they can also freely scoop up valuable stuff from all the independents who can't afford to pay for their currently non-commerical work.
Not with the article but rather the attitudes of the people here...
On one hand you're all screaming that it's not really property and that it has no real hard value but when someone proposes that, yes it is property and that it does have value you all do a 360 and start screaming for taxes to be due.
So which is it? Are the copyright holders holding real property with a hard value, like land, or are they in possession of an idea that has no recognizable value? If it's the former than fine, tax them but don't cry about warrants and people going to jail for theft if it's the later than there should be no tax and this idea should be shrugged off as ridiculous.
It's more and more apparent around here that what the average slashdotter really wants is for companies to be beaten down so the individual can make some short term benefit. But in the long run this is an awful plan. The very technology that sits in front of you today was built up by the same companies that you want to destroy for no other reason than to think you're the David to modern societies Golliath. It's petty and disturbing that people don't look beyond their noses before they scream for blood.
Wow. I can't believe it. Besides, the premise is completely flawed. Do we pay taxes on wardrobes we own (our clothes)? Our gadgets? How about computers? May, since you guys want more taxation so much, we should tax you for every computer and tv you own?
You are insane to want more taxation.
Not all states even have a tax on 'property'. And there is no federal tax on property that i know of.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Instead of charging a fee, just make the maintainence of copyright time consuming. Make the owner fill out a long tedious form for each song every year, like doing taxes. Hire a team of vogons to create the forms.
A small artist who values his or her work will take the time to maintain their own copyrights. However, this would not be cost effective for large corporation that owns 1000s of copyrights. They would have to let the less-profitable copyrights lapse.
I'd like to point out that trademark doesn't equal copyright doesn't equal patent.
Trademarks involve exclusive use of names. They contribute to nothing aside from product and/or manufacturer identification. They don't contain any inherent knowledge, they are symbolic. There would be no point in taxing trademarks such as "Linux" or putting them in the public domain.
Copyrights grant exclusive use on expressive creativity. Copyrighted works can contain knowledge and ideas, but even if they present an idea, they only cover the specific expression of that idea (i.e., the way the author depicted the idea in words or illustration), not the idea (pragmatic knowledge or other insight) itself. They keep specific works of creativity from being appropriated by people other than the creator/owner. Copyrights can be valuable, though there are ways around them...someone just has to understand the expression and re-express it in another unique manner.
Patents grant exclusive use on pragmatic creativity. They contain knowledge and ideas, and while they don't cover the expression of the knowledge, they do cover ANY implementation of the knowledge they contain. They're complementary to copyrights and don't really overlap. They keep the ability to apply knowledge from being appropriated by people other than the creator/owner. The only way around a patent is to make nontrivial changes to the application of the idea that achieves the same function.
So in a word, no, this proposal wouldn't affect Linux at all. When you hear about M$ or SCO trying to go after Linux for alleged infringements, it seems to be more on the basis of copyright violation than of patent violation. They allege that people working on Linux simply took pieces of their copyrighted code and stuck it in the kernel. They are NOT going after Linux because they hold a patent on OS behavior that Linux simply mimics and therefore infringes on a patent, they say that code was stolen, and they have to prove that they were the first to create the code, and that it was basically lifted verbatim. I have yet to hear anyone protest that Linux WASN'T designed to basically replicate UNIX in a non-proprietary way; I seem to recall that was Linus' original stated purpose-- to make something that worked like UNIX and could be used in almost exactly the same manner, but wasn't burdened by oppressive licensing baggage and proprietary code.
Further, Linux is safe because its copyright isn't Linus' responsibility or anyone else's; the license is public, and gives the work to the public with license restrictions. Even if there was something that required the copyright holder who released something under GNU/GPL to renew or pay taxes on something "or it would be turned over to the public domain", it would still be safe in the public domain. It would not bankrupt Linux, it would just make it more difficult to copyright works with restrictive licenses (whereas public domain works have no restrictions on use, release of source, or the other little things that the conditional licenses demand). Creative Commons is just another flavor of the FOSS licensing schemes, only for creative expression. It's not public domain either, but can be somewhat close. These are ways of sharing the knowledge and expression of copyrighted works, while still allowing the creator some level of control over the way the work is subsequently handled by the public.
Different entities. Property taxes come from the state/city/county government. Income taxes come from the Federal government (and some states). That's why you are taxed twice. And you do get credit on each tax for the other tax you paid. Your property taxes go to roads, schools, etc. Generally local stuff. Your income tax goes to Washington (and your state capital if you are income taxed in your state). You can read all about the fight between states rights vs federal rights in any American history book if you want to better understand who gets a piece of your ass each year. Our government, believe it or not, does have structure as well as checks and balances. At each level, it is very efficient at taking money in the form of taxes. Sometimes justified, sometimes not.
And how does income taxation allow copyright "to promote the Progress" in the cases of orphan works and dog-in-the-manger cases like Disney's Song of the South?
It doesn't. It's not supposed to. Taxes - currently - have nothing to do with Copyrights (except for income generated, which has already been pointed out by GP). That's what the article is about. The idea that we should "tax" IP and mix the two.
FWIW, I think it's a bad idea.
If user-generated content was automatically placed in the public domain if a registration/fee process was not followed.. then you'd essentially generate a market of content-squatters - you'd have a multitude of people reposting other peoples popular content with no attribution to the original author.
/. posts -- it's not as though you'd be harmed if they were copied. It's not as though you'd lose anything. And the decision as to whether to get a copyright or not would be up to you. You'd have to opt-in, rather than getting one automatically, is all.
That's not squatting, really, since the squatters don't adversely possess the works; that is, they aren't trying to wrest exclusive control from the creator, but are merely using it equally.
And if you do have these reposts, then so what? If it mattered to the authors, they would get copyrights. It's not as though this would be a secret. Probably it won't matter. Consider, for example, your
I'm interested in a flatter entertainment market, and that can only come around when the Chocolate Rain kid can compete on equal ground with the established media players, based upon a quality metric of (taste nonewithstanding) end-user views, or similar.
He sure can. All he needs to do is fill in the form, etc. I'm not suggesting that fees should be a way for the Copyright Office to support itself or to turn a profit. I just want to separate out people who don't care about copyrights (particularly people who don't care and thus wouldn't bother to dedicate their works to the public domain, since they'd have to care to do so) from people who do. A fee of a dollar would be sufficient. It's akin to copays with health care. They're not a substantial form of revenue, but they discourage wastefulness.
The copyright proposal you advocate will only create a barrier to entry and thus prevent this from occurring.
No, it will aid it, since there will be a far greater pool of public domain materials for the authors to draw upon. Nor will it be a barrier, since it is so tremendously low and available to everyone.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
What you are suggesting is a luxury tax. That's (some of the reason) why they tax RV's, boats, etc. Some of that tax is for local "infrastructure" stuff so it's justified. But the rest is generally thought of as a luxury tax. ie: we tax the luxury because people don't really need it.
Could you charge a luxury tax on IP?
Intuition tells me IP would be deemed "essential" for a corporation who depends on it (Disney) but I don't know. Long-lasting IP might be considered a luxury if it has FAR paid back the original creators (ie: the authors).
What if we luxury taxed IP after the author/creator's death or some specified time limit?
(p.s: yes, I know...the better solution is simply to fix the copyright terms but this is an intellectual exercise anyway. It's NOT going to happen anytime soon.)
So in other words only the rich now can make money on anything that would be considered IP
No, not if the fee is small and reasonable - which it is. Yes, anyone of us can register a copyrighted work. Do it right here. It's $45 to register a literary work. If your living depends on it, I'm betting you can find $45 to "invest" in your idea. If you can't, maybe you should find something else to do.
And note: currently, you do NOT have to register a copyright for the copyright to be recognized. (However, I think you have to register if you go to court to defend it. Not sure...anyone?)
If it auto-magically slips into the public domain - then anyone can use it for no fees/no restrictions. Congress determines when that happens and the limit varies, depending on the copyright
This would be rather like the folks who used to repost Wikipedia pages and grab advertising revenue, except it would be harder to mitigate as Wikipedia being a single source was easy to promote in search ranking. I don't want to go back to an internet which looks like that - until Google tweaked their algorithm it was hard to find non-Wikipedia related search results.
And if you do have these reposts, then so what? If it mattered to the authors, they would get copyrights. It's not as though this would be a secret. Probably it won't matter. Consider, for example, yourThe same would go for the Chocolate Rain kid. Someone somewhere would have seen the rising interest and snapped up the ad revenue - these leeches would turn it into a profession. You haven't made the case as to why or how this would benefit a) content creators, b) the general public.
I just want to separate out people who don't care about copyrights (particularly people who don't care and thus wouldn't bother to dedicate their works to the public domain, since they'd have to care to do so) from people who do. A fee of a dollar would be sufficient. It's akin to copays with health care. They're not a substantial form of revenue, but they discourage wastefulness. What wastefulness? With automatic copyright you have a youtube full of videos for which assumed copyright goes to the user who uploaded them. This copyright is assumed, and can safely remain so, until a challenge claim is made. It provides a simple mechanism for the little guy to benefit from their automatic copyright at no cost. This seems efficient to me, not wasteful.Or do you mean that material which is copyrighted, and not being currently used, should be in the public domain.. as not to waste the potential for another to use it freely?
Could we not achieve the same ends by modifying copyright to allow for mashing/inclusion/remixing with correct attribution, and with the option to appeal to an independent body to determine what the revenue split should be in case of disagreement? Could all be online, no one loses their rights, and creativity and innovation are still properly rewarded.
It cannot be equal as it becomes a one to many relationship - one creator, multiple opportunistic reposters. Exclusive control is irrelevant when income from advertising revenue would go to the first reposter who got it linked to slashdot/digg/whatever. This would be a mess, with zero-cost and zero-risk to repost other peoples public domain content, the internet would be awash with people racing to cash in.
No, it is equal. There is nothing that prevents the creator from getting those links to his work from multiple sites, rather than some reposter. Indeed, if anything, the creator has a first-to-market advantage, since he is the first person to know of the work and where he's put it.
This would be rather like the folks who used to repost Wikipedia pages and grab advertising revenue, except it would be harder to mitigate as Wikipedia being a single source was easy to promote in search ranking. I don't want to go back to an internet which looks like that - until Google tweaked their algorithm it was hard to find non-Wikipedia related search results.
And the problem with that was?
Well, say this post wins the $10 million dollar annual Slashdot 'Best Post' prize.
Well, it's hard to predict how the Slashdot Academy will choose who to nominate or award.
Since your words are in the public domain, all that revenue would go to me, rather than a split based on how many quoted characters of yours were included if you had retained copyright.
No. First, because your typical award of that nature really has nothing to do with copyright anyway. E.g. the Nobel for literature goes to the author, not whoever holds the copyright, if there even is a copyright. No one is interested in giving prizes for creation to someone other than the creator. Second, your use of my words, even if they were copyrighted, would pretty certainly be a fair use, and not infringing, so I couldn't even make a realistic claim on a share of the purse.
I've not only lost nothing, I never had a chance to gain.
Someone somewhere would have seen the rising interest and snapped up the ad revenue - these leeches would turn it into a profession. You haven't made the case as to why or how this would benefit a) content creators, b) the general public.
A) I don't care whether or not creators benefit. Copyright isn't meant to help them. It's like asking how a dairy cow benefits from the sale of milk. Copyright is meant to benefit the public, and in order to accomplish that, some incidental benefit might happen to be conferred on authors. But it should always be as little private benefit as possible, for as great a public benefit as possible, and it's always secondary; a means, not an end.
B) The general public always benefits when copies of the same work -- which are commodities -- can be acquired from multiple sources that are in competition, thus reducing the cost to the public down to about the marginal cost of the copies themselves. Copyrights are monopolies, and monopolies are never good for the public, but may sometimes be necessary evils to be tolerated for a brief time, if they don't overstep their bounds.
It provides a simple mechanism for the little guy to benefit from their automatic copyright at no cost. This seems efficient to me, not wasteful.
Oh, it is very efficient for the author, but I wasn't speaking of him, nor do I care whether the author realizes a gain or not. It is wasteful to the public. Copyrights are an artificial right, granted by the public via the government that draws its power and legitimacy from the public. The right is to be a monopolist, charging monopoly prices, which means that the value of a copyright comes directly out of the pockets of everyone else! If it is necessary to grant the right to serve a public purpose, and the public nevertheless sees a net benefit even after having been extorted, then so be it. But if the author would've created and published the work regardless, then there is no reason for th
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well...maybe start with the penalties for copyright violation -- how much is that the RIAA wants the penalties to be *per song*?
Sounds like a great idea...is it 350K/song?...maybe 10 songs/CD...3.5Million/CD. So starting, that should be about 1% "property tax"/CD owned going to state & local for funding schools...might even be able to fund a copyright course or two... Of course that is "per year"...
Maybe some corps might want to 'give up' the copyright on some of their properties? But thinking about though I'd have to say it should be counted as a piece of property for each edition/version/release of a song -- so an album might be one, a single would be another, a "collection of best hits" would be another...but wait, there's more...K-Tel re-releases, Christmas specials... each "incidence" of copying the song would be a unique viola^h^h^h^h^h count for computing taxation...
It could be "worse" -- counting the 350K/song against each sale of the song as the song's total worth? Then
again, if a song brings in 50 million in "revenue" in a year, then maybe that is it's value in that year? Just a thought, I suppose...though all the taxes would eventually come out of the consumer's pocket, no doubt. sigh....
It cannot be equal as it becomes a one to many relationship - one creator, multiple opportunistic reposters. Exclusive control is irrelevant when income from advertising revenue would go to the first reposter who got it linked to slashdot/digg/whatever. This would be a mess, with zero-cost and zero-risk to repost other peoples public domain content, the internet would be awash with people racing to cash in.
No, it is equal. There is nothing that prevents the creator from getting those links to his work from multiple sites, rather than some reposter. Indeed, if anything, the creator has a first-to-market advantage, since he is the first person to know of the work and where he's put it.
The very case I am arguing for is the case where revenue is unexpected (such as a viral video which takes off), such that the creator would never go to the trouble of obtaining copyright if a separate registration/fee process was required. Content of this nature (e.g. the Chocolate Rain kid) has unpredictable chances of success to the creator, less so to individuals who would inevitably make it their profession to leech/promote/link other peoples work. The content creator would thus be disenfranchised if their works automatically entered the public domain.
This would be rather like the folks who used to repost Wikipedia pages and grab advertising revenue, except it would be harder to mitigate as Wikipedia being a single source was easy to promote in search ranking. I don't want to go back to an internet which looks like that - until Google tweaked their algorithm it was hard to find non-Wikipedia related search results.
And the problem with that was?
You would search for "tennis shoes", and get not only the Wikipedia page on tennis shoes, but dozens or more copies of that page which 3rd parties had lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, and put on their own domain with various revenue-generating adverts. This made it more difficult to search because the results set was so muddied.
Since your words are in the public domain, all that revenue would go to me, rather than a split based on how many quoted characters of yours were included if you had retained copyright.
No. First, because your typical award of that nature really has nothing to do with copyright anyway. E.g. the Nobel for literature goes to the author, not whoever holds the copyright, if there even is a copyright. No one is interested in giving prizes for creation to someone other than the creator. Second, your use of my words, even if they were copyrighted, would pretty certainly be a fair use, and not infringing, so I couldn't even make a realistic claim on a share of the purse. I've not only lost nothing, I never had a chance to gain.
Well, you took my silly example but disregarded the revenue-distribution crux of it and made up one of your own. Maybe we can agree on a more general point - that sometimes popular content is unpredictable at the time of its creation?
Someone somewhere would have seen the rising interest and snapped up the ad revenue - these leeches would turn it into a profession. You haven't made the case as to why or how this would benefit a) content creators, b) the general public.
A) I don't care whether or not creators benefit. Copyright isn't meant to help them. It's like asking how a dairy cow benefits from the sale of milk. Copyright is meant to benefit the public, and in order to accomplish that, some incidental benefit might happen to be conferred on authors. But it should always be as little private benefit as possible, for as great a public benefit as possible, and it's always secondary; a means, not an end. B) The general public always benefits when copies of the same work -- which are commodities -- can be acquired from multiple sources that are in competition, thus reducing the cost to the public down to about the marginal cost of the copi
Just another 'revenue source' - huh? ...
Then there be a monster of an earner
The IDIOT TAX for creeps that think new taxes are "cool".
RR
The very case I am arguing for is the case where revenue is unexpected (such as a viral video which takes off), such that the creator would never go to the trouble of obtaining copyright if a separate registration/fee process was required. Content of this nature (e.g. the Chocolate Rain kid) has unpredictable chances of success to the creator, less so to individuals who would inevitably make it their profession to leech/promote/link other peoples work. The content creator would thus be disenfranchised if their works automatically entered the public domain.
/. crowd. Publishers, very often, are more important to the success of a work than the author is. Oh, it's important to get a good work to begin with, as you can only pretty up crap
Well, no one is really that good at estimating what works by unknowns will turn out to be successes, and whether those successes will be minor (e.g. one-hit wonders) or truly significant. The publishing industries take a shotgun approach as a result. A record label might fund a hundred bands, with the hope that one or two will be successful enough to compensate for the losses on the others, and yield a hefty profit besides.
Anyway, if an author created a work for some reason other than the belief that he could exploit the copyright of that work to make money -- for example, if he created the work for the fame, or for arts' sake, or for any of a number of other, non-copyright-related reasons -- then it is inappropriate for him to get a copyright. We should try to only grant copyrights when necessary to cause works to be created and published. If a work would be created and published regardless, then no copyright should issue. A registration system is about the best way we have to make the determination of which works should and shouldn't get copyrights; authors who are incentivized by copyright will seek it out, authors who aren't will ignore it.
It is therefore perfectly desirable that 1) if the author doesn't care about his work enough to jump a very tiny hurdle in order to get a copyright, he doesn't get one; and 2) for such public domain works, the public can enjoy competition by many diverse publishers, rather than having to deal with a monopolist.
Authors certainly are not getting 'disenfranchised' because they would have never bothered to get 'enfranchised' to begin with. Copyright is a lottery, in that most of them are worthless, but if you don't bother to play, you can't win. I don't mind allowing authors to work for free, if they're willing to. Why would I ever be against it?
You would search for "tennis shoes", and get not only the Wikipedia page on tennis shoes, but dozens or more copies of that page which 3rd parties had lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, and put on their own domain with various revenue-generating adverts. This made it more difficult to search because the results set was so muddied.
Well, no, actually. If they're lifting the content verbatim, then it's the same no matter where I go. Plus, of course, if I search for "tennis shoes" it isn't as though Google is going to give me the Wikipedia entry and nothing else whatsoever. There's going to be lots of hits, and in fact, having just tried it, Wikipedia is 24th. Personally, when I want to search for something on Wikipedia, I usually google for it with the additional term site:wikipedia.org to limit results to that domain. In fact, there's a handy Firefox plugin that does this for me.
I'm not seeing a problem here. I certainly don't see a problem with there being multiple copies of a work. Nor does Wikipedia, which specifically permits exactly this. If they don't mind, why should I care that you do? Especially when there's such an easy solution?
Maybe we can agree on a more general point - that sometimes popular content is unpredictable at the time of its creation?
Again, I'd go further. That's almost always the case. In fact, this is why I'm often so disappointed at the short shrift that publishers get from the
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"So you establish a reasonable period of monopoly that's tax-free. Say, for the first 5 or 7 or even 10 years a copyright is tax-free"
... it can't, without a lot more bureaucracy. So that then also adds a great deal more bureaucracy, thats going to add additional costs and waste yet more time dealing with it all. Plus there can be dozens and often hundreds of individual bits of IP within a product. Thats a lot to keep track and so a lot more tracking costs to deal with it.
... all this, simply to get some free stuff via P2P networks, (and then have to deal with a lot of red tape bureaucracy and government tracking of who gets what IP when, where, and how, attached to it ... and they will continue to want to track it)? ... its not worth it.
... "Copyright law doesn't have broad coverage, trolls or rewards for gaming the system" ... "Yet" is the point. As soon as you add a tax to IP, it will also make trolls and gaming of the system possible as well. They will want to hold an IP to sell it to someone else. Wherever there's money to be made off other people, someone will be trolling or trying to game that system.
That won't work. Inventors can often work for a very long time. A decade or two to get their idea to market. (Inventors also often have limited time and money to start a company and so startup is a slow hard process. Building a business often takes many years. While the news sometimes has cases where people invent something, then quickly earn big money, thats not the norm. Often people have to work a very long time on a project, before they finally see success). Also how can such a time scale limit even be policed?
(And thats before we even get into people wanting to hold IP on software routines and techniques, as a big program could contain 1000s of routines each considered as their own IP).
And as for
Yeah it doesn't yet!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
I've been following the patent and IP discussions closely and I am wondering if there could be an easy fix for all that mess:
Make the copy- and patent rights non-transferrable.
Think about it, it was a human that created the thing in the first place, so why should a non-human (corporation) be allowed to own it?
Most of the problems stem from BigCorps with lot$ of money owning the rights, and as we all know, anonymous corporations don't have morals. So a creator/inventor can still cash in upon licensing the invention or having a corporation protect his copyright for a slice of the share, but there would be no way to assemble a patent portfolio in the first place. Thus IP-only firms would have a hard time, because they wouldn't own anything, just representing one or a group of inventors.
This argument makes no sense. It is trying to say that IP, if it is property, should be taxed just like real property is taxed. It then argues that such a tax would have beneficial results. But this argument fails for four major reasons:
1) The analogy fails because the rationale for taxing IP is nothing like the rationale for taxing real property. (Nobody has to provide sewer service to your copyright or pay for schools for your level 70 Shaman's kids.)
2) IP is already taxed when it makes sense to tax it. For example, if you sell or license your copyright or auction off your level 70 Shaman on eBay, the profits are taxed.
3) Taxes on IP would be disastrous if actually implemented. They would have harmful effects that tremendously outweigh any potential benefits. Do you seriously think you should pay a tax every time you level up?
4) If you try to say that you can tax copyrights but not contractual virtual property like game characters, you will find that it's not difficult to implement copyrights in another scheme that acts more like game characters. For example, copyrights can be completely implement with contracts. The net effect would, at best, be to replace the taxed copyright scheme with an untaxed contract scheme that might be even more restrictive. Would you rather live in a world with copyrights or a world where you have to sign a contract to enter a movie theater or buy a CD? (That contract may not say anything about fair use, nor would it have to.)
- An arbitrary number of years (2, 5, or 17) would be able to be "fair" across the spectrum of patentable ideas
- How a system like this could actually be implemented such that it prevents corporations from usurping power over individuals
I have not personally ever seen an instance where corporations haven't had advantages over individuals, since they are legally treated as a "person" to protect the individuals who really are controlling the capital. I would estimate that 99%+ of "patent squatters" are corporate.Why not have a system where patents are valued according to an IP market. If you cannot pay the taxes on the market value, then you have to sell the patent to pay your debt... If the idea is really worth so much, then instead of selling the idea, sell rights to create use the idea? Have it due to expire on an annual basis with a 10-day grace period. Lawsuits could then not be based on BS estimations of what losses are incurred from patent infringement, but rather tangible based on the IP market. Dragging out lawsuits over IP can then be rendered unprofitable, since markets will be more realistic at evaluating an idea than lawyers.
Also, implement a low-cost or free patent system for ideas immediately released into the public domain. Then stupid crap like one-click shopping, method of swinging on a swingset, or jump-rope methods could then be made into a game and fund-raiser type of game, and could be the first place to look to stop seemingly-silly-but-actually-scary-stupid-crap that seems a lot more plausible than it did perhaps a decade ago.
You would search for "tennis shoes", and get not only the Wikipedia page on tennis shoes, but dozens or more copies of that page which 3rd parties had lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, and put on their own domain with various revenue-generating adverts. This made it more difficult to search because the results set was so muddied.
Well, no, actually. If they're lifting the content verbatim, then it's the same no matter where I go. Plus, of course, if I search for "tennis shoes" it isn't as though Google is going to give me the Wikipedia entry and nothing else whatsoever.
Incorrect on both counts:
But we are moving towards a society where increasingly the general public holds more and more copyright
No, the general public never holds copyrights, unless you want to construe the public domain in that fashion. (I see no point in doing so, myself) Copyrights are always held by one, or a few, against the whole populace. Now, it's not one small bloc of people and businesses that comprise the majority of the copyright holders, but so what? How does this matter? Especially since merely holding a copyright is no assurance of any success at all. The financial success is still highly concentrated, and copyright has no effect on that.
"But we are moving towards a society where increasingly the general public holds more and more copyright - the ratio of content creators to the general public approaches 1:1 with every blog created, every forum post submitted, every facebook account started."
I thank you for pointing out my lazy use of language. Agreed - the general public (as a single entity) does not hold copyright, however almost every member of the general public who has performed one of the activities I requoted above, does now hold copyright.
Not only that, but they hold copyright on ventures which profit from their contribution.
Automatic copyright not having an assurance of success is not a reason to disregard it.
The important thing is that if an author isn't willing to take even a modest gamble on his work, ab initio, then I am not willing to give him a copyright. All he needs to do is properly register. It's not hard. If he doesn't care to, then I'm not going to do it for him, especially since I -- and the rest of the public -- benefit from his inattention.
This is like arguing that if I buy a plot of land, anyone who finds a nugget of gold in it can not only keep that nugget.. but call in a gold nugget extraction company and keep everything for themselves before I even finish my breakfast. Yet if I had invested $1 in an "All potential gold nuggets (which may or may not exist) on my land belong to me" sign, this couldn't happen. All IP has a finite financial resource potential which in the vast majority of cases cannot be determined with any degree of accuracy at the outset.
The primary beneficiaries towards individual inattention to rights are never some amorphous general public, but specific entities who leech for their personal gain.
Surely then, if advertising revenue is being generated, then an argument could be made that to maximize the benefit to the general public their share of that revenue should be protected?
No, such an argument would be nonsense. If the
The content was lifted verbatim on a particular date, but not updated. Any errors or subsequent updates to that page in Wikipedia would not be present in the masquerading copies.
That's a risk with Wikipedia anyway, and if it was an issue, then people would just turn to encyclopedia providers that had a reputation for accuracy, whether that's Wikipedia only, or some more conscientious Wikipedia-reprinters. This is basically the problem that trademarks are used to solve: you use the brand to determine the source of goods, with the expectation that all goods from that source will have similar levels of quality (whether good or bad). It's like how anyone can build an IBM-compatible computer, but certain brands indicate reliable machines, and certain brands indicate crap. This isn't a good argument for copyrights, though.
These various older revisions of the Wikipedia entry flooded to the top of the results set, as the revenue scrapers tried various tricks to increase their search ranking.
And that is a problem with how well Google works. Again, not something that really matters for copyright purposes.
Automatic copyright not having an assurance of success is not a reason to disregard it.
That's not why I don't like it. In fact, I know that even with an opt-in system of copyrights, most will still lack economic value. The difference is, if we're going to offer subsidies for works, and if issuing those subsidies is not cost-free (which is the case, since all copyrights harm the public by their very existence), then we should selectively offer the subsidies only when necessary. Lacking psychic powers, we can't read the minds of authors and know whether or not a copyright is needed for work A, but not for work B. The best we can do is to ask the authors and hope that they'll be truthful; thus, an opt-in system is the best system we can set up. An opt-out system wouldn't work, because the authors we're trying to exclude (on a per-work basis) are the ones that are likeliest to not indicate their preference either way.
This is like arguing that if I buy a plot of land, anyone who finds a nugget of gold in it can not only keep that nugget.. but call in a gold nugget extraction company and keep everything for themselves before I even finish my breakfast. Yet if I had invested $1 in an "All potential gold nuggets (which may or may not exist) on my land belong to me" sign, this couldn't happen.
The funny thing is, that's kind of accurate. The law disfavors waste, and favors the constructive use of property. If you have a parcel of land that you are not using, someone else can move in, openly act as the owner, and in time, displace you. It's called adverse possession, and is an ancient part of real property law. It doesn't happen before you can finish your breakfast, but even with times of 5-25 years (depending on where it happens), it still happens pretty regularly. Especially if it's not the fee simple that is possessed, but a mere easement. (E.g. if someone trespasses across your land long enough, basically using it for a shortcut, they can ultimately get the right to use it as a shortcut whether you like it or not) And a good way to foil adverse possession is to maintain your land, erect fences and 'no trespassing' signs, and generally behave as the owner ought to, rather than ignoring the land.
Note that some people in the legal field have suggested applying this concept to copyrights and patents.
The primary beneficiaries towards individual inattention to rights are never some amorphous general public, but specific entities who leech for their personal gain.
No, not at all. The public benefits whenever there are more publishers than when there are fewer. The public benefits whenever derivative works are created as opposed to when they aren't. The public benefits by copying works for free, as opposed to when they aren't allowed. Even if most members of the public do not fully exercise their rights (I would have a hard time stor
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
There are a few nit-picky points I could argue, but I think by and large we have covered this issue. Note that I state what I believe, because I'm not entirely sure we have the tools available to draw this to a conclusion which isn't tainted by belief. Unless you'd accept something like an artificial life simulation using the properties of emergence to model the various actors involved?
I would like to thank you for your time - as I've certainly found it a very interesting debate - and if you wish I can respond in full to your last post rather than my attempt above to distill it down to what I see as our main differences as philosophy.
I believe that an economy of micro-transactions (a scaled up AdSense, if you will) based upon copyrights on any and all user created content and funded through advertising, would be a more compelling future than one where content was placed in the public domain unless copyright was explicitly sought by the author.
Why? First, you're throwing money at authors who don't appear to need it, and took no steps towards so much as asking for it. That's wasteful. When someone gives you something for free, why not let them? Second, there's no real assurance that microtransactions work. It's been a pie in the sky idea for well over a decade now. Third, especially why would it work if funded by advertising? I for one, despise unsolicited advertising in all its forms, and use filters to get rid of it whenever possible. And I certainly would bemoan the idea of yet more ads plastered in every nook and cranny.
Opt-in copyright, OTOH, has a long and successful history. It works, we know it works, and for most of the time that we have had copyright at all, that is what it has been. The current era of copyright is the aberration.
Unless you'd accept something like an artificial life simulation using the properties of emergence to model the various actors involved?
Do you have one?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.