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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.
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
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.
(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-