Slashdot Mirror
The Copyright Crusade a Lost Cause?
A. Smith writes "Ars Technica is exploring the relationship between property rights and copyright, arguing that copyright holders are making a mistake by stressing similarities between property rights and copyright. They compare P2P users to 18th-century squatters in North America: 'Like squatters of old, many ordinary users find copyright law bewildering and are frustrated by the arbitrary restrictions it imposes. Customers wanting to rip their DVD collections to their computers, download music they can play on any device, or incorporate copyrighted works into original creative works find that there is no straightforward, legal way to do these things.' They conclude by offering that more reasonable, understandable copyright restrictions would result in a user base friendlier to publisher interests."
if they are arguing property is property no matter what, then it would seem to me it should be taxed as such.
just an idea i read about in the last week or so.
-.no
Well then we have to consider that copyrighted works are intangible, and bare little resemblance to physical property. You can appraise the value of a warehouse, factory, store or residence. How do you appraise the value of a copyrighted work?
How would you determine the tax to be paid on an open source project? Or on this post?
Mind you I'm just carrying forward a point someone else brought up, not necessarily vouching for it.
That's because in RIAA Amerika, DVD rips YOU!
What amazes me is the absolute whining about the "need to extend copyright beyond 50 years because people are living longer, and a writer con't be able to make (even more) money in their old age off something they created when they were young." Extended copyright discourages innovation by encouraging people to "rest on their laurels". 50 years is too much. 20 years should be more than enough.
If I bought a book, I could lend that book to my friends as much as I wanted to. I could take the pages, rip them out of the binding and scrapbook them. If I did it in such a way that the book's pages were merely decoration, I could even reproduce that scrapbook for non-profit use. I could scan that book into a computer and read it to my heart's content.
If for some reason the book had a lock on it, then I could break that lock to read it. If the company uses a special kind of binding that's supposed to allow me to read the book, but not take the pages out of it, I could circumvent that binding all I want. I could sell the book to somebody else for whatever price I wanted to. If a page of the book started fading or was scratched, I could photocopy the page so I'd have a backup.
Just because it's in a digital format doesn't nullify my rights to my copy of the work.
Well, we have appraisers (my gf is one) that can assign value to personal property based on past sales, market conditions, etc... etc... I really don't see why that cannot be done with ideas. And just like tangible properties, this value may change.
For instance, to claim a copyright over an essay you write on slashdot, may cost you $0.01, based on how much ad-based revenue can be expected from reading a web-page containing it. If you then proceed to publish this essay in a personal blog, you'd need to pay $0.10 to claim copyright. If it gets published in NY Times, you'd need to pay $100/year to keep it. (all the prices, of course, are purely arbitrary)
Guidelines can be made that would allow people who generate content, to pay for blanket copyright of similar kinds of content... while especially valuable objects would need to be individually appraised. This would work the same way that property insurance works - your insurance will cover anything in your house up to a certain value... but any objects that are over that, have to be declared individually.
Maybe if Disney had to pay a few million $ per year to maintain copyright of Mickey... and BMG had to lay out a hundred thousand for every album they'd like to keep out of the public domain, we'd have a much more balanced system.
Simple: The creator/owner sets a price for the intellectual property, and is taxed based on that price. If they want to change the price, they have to back-date taxes for 3 years. If a person wants to buy the intellectual property, it must be up for grabs for a certain multiple of the price the creator sets.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The problem is capitalism, and private property in general. The tragedy of the commons, the commonly accepted justification for its existence, only occurs when the interests of the individual are not in sync with the interests of the society. This is an example of a system that ill suits its participants, and is something that can be solved with a better system and better infrastructure. The current system is one that is intrinsicly unfriendly to the creation of subsystems that result in "plenty for everyone". We're actively destroying our more intelligent systems and creating scarcity at this point, they call it "privatization".
These various artificial scarcity conditions are meant to deal with the fact that a few rich people control everything you need to live. If there wasn't the illusion that you might get leverage through these artifical scarcity rules, people would see how powerless they really are, and then they'd revolt and kill the rich bastards and take what they need. That's how WWII started, with enforced systematic economic hopelessness.
As the fictions start coming down and more and more people realize that their leverage was never real leverage at all, just a fiction, the disparity will become increasingly obvious, and there will be a revolt. It's just a matter of time.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth