Slashdot Mirror
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 is not quite true.
Many states have personal property tax, for instance Virginia taxes your car, boat, RV, and things like that every year.
However, I don't think the worry is about personally owned IP, but rather corporate. A very large number of business jurisdictions tax businesses based on their owned property. As one property tax official told me in one locale, "if it's necessary to run your business it must be listed, and we tax it." If that's the business attitude of the tax man, I think the editorial is spot on.
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
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
Perhaps the solution is some sort of automatic grace period? For instance, anyone can maintain copyright on a work for say a timeperiod of 1-year tax-free, but after that they either have to start ponying up (because it's economically relevant enough to care) or lose the copyright. The problem I foresee is figuring out how to appropriately tax copyrights. Photographers for instance sometimes rely on copyright protection to generate revenue off their work, but since an individual photo realistically generates a fraction of their necessary income they would be paying through the nose in taxes. Whereas a huge company like UMG or Sony could easily afford the taxes on their entire vast catalog if they paid the same rate as say a photographer. The trick is finding a way to do this that leverages huge companies to drop some of their less profitable copyrights without killing the livelihood of individual creators.
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.
I am sitting in a chair, no one is going to TAX me on the fact that I own some chair (personal property).
That's not exactly true. If you're sitting in a car seat, then you're likely being taxed on it. Some states would even tax you for what's in your home, New Hampshire comes to mind, when I lived there, every 5 years or so they would come by and assess your house, now you could not let them inside, but this would cause them to estimate something that's probably higher then your house and everything that's in it. But they would always ask to see what's inside your house, and if you had say i really nice home theater system, yea that adds to the assessment. \
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
First, this is not true. Most artists never become successful at all. Further, when a work does turn out to have copyright-related economic value, it is almost invariably 'front-loaded.' That is, you can exploit the work for the most money immediately upon publication in some medium, with the value steadily and rapidly decreasing thereafter. E.g. a movie sells the most tickets on opening weekend, and fewer every week after until finally it is so unprofitable that it leaves the theaters. When it comes out on video, it sells the most copies the first week, and again, fewer every week after that. The time horizon is usually measured in months per medium of publication. A movie might have a month, a book might have as long as a year. A newspaper, only a few hours (people don't often buy morning editions at night on the same day, much less later on), certain kinds of textbooks, perhaps several years. Creating a work that has lasting economic value is about as rare as winning the lottery. It is just stupid to design our policies around that sort of thing, it's so rare.
Second, why should we care about the little guy -- or any author, of whatever size -- at all? Copyright is meant to serve the public interest, period. This means encouraging authors to create works the otherwise wouldn't've created, and getting those works into the public domain as soon as possible (with as little protection as possible prior to that). So long as the author creates works, it is utterly immaterial whether or not he makes money at it. Nor is it a bad thing for a work to enter the public domain and for other authors, regardless of whether they're big or small, to make some use of it. All that matters is getting the most number of works created for the least amount of cost in the form of copyright protection granted (i.e. what copyrights are granted initially, how broad the grants are, and how long the grants last). Entertaining silly, romantic notions of authors is what has gotten us into the mess we now find ourselves in. We need to stop with that crap. Copyright is utilitarian; whatever copyright system best serves the public, that's what we need, without one iota of concern for authors, save for how their condition might affect the public good that is our real sole issue. The most works for the least copyright 'buck.' It's as simple as that.
-- 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.
> 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
(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-