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."

Comments

if ip = real p, how about some taxes

[jt418-93]

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.

Re:if ip = real p, how about some taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

And last week, I suggested the following "tax":

- Each copyright must be re-registered on a yearly basis. The fee for re-registration depends solely on the length of the copyright term. By this formula:

$0.01 * (2 ^ number_of_yearly_renewals)

Thus, it is $0.01 for the first registration, $0.02 for the second year, $0.04 for the third year .. and doubling.

So, after 10 years, it's only $10.24

But, after 16 years, it's $655.36

And after 32 years, it's $42,949,672.96

And after 50 years, it's $11,258,999,068,426.24

This means that any small guy or girl (no matter how poor) can easily keep his or her copyright for 10 years. However, no individual or company will be able to copyright out of the public domain for 50 years!

I consider it the perfect balancing factor between "publisher's rights" (limited rights, granted to PROMOTE THE USEFUL ARTS AND SCIENCES) vs. the public interest (that'd be ME, YOU, and EVERYONE else).

Update: If you want to avoid the hassle of re-registration, you can pay in advance. $10.24 as a pre-payment means you're good for ten years without the need to re-register. You can extend by paying the difference ($645.12 after 10 years will give you another 6 without need to re-register) as many times as you can afford.

The rate $0.01, doubling every year thereafter, is to be enshrined as Amendment 0 in the Constitution and unable to be changed except by 80% vote of Congress, approval by minimum 7 out of 9 supreme court justices, the signature of the President and Vice-President, and an 80% popular majority of the voting population.

Can anybody see any reason why this isn't the perfect plan?

Re:Inconsistent Logic

[Microlith]

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.

Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but...

[moderatorrater]

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.

Re:Possible model

[aix tom]

Heck, WE don't need to figure out or appraise how much one copyright for one work is worth.

Just take the amount the RIAA wants as damages for one copyright infringement, since that is what they TELL us their copyright is worth, and multiply that with the amount of copies they can theoretical make of that work, and compute the tax based on that amount.

After all, when they calculate their damages on the theoretical copies sold without pirating, why shouldn't the taxes also be calculated on the theoretical amount of possible copies.

For works that are never involved in lawsuits there would be no tax, so that would take care of those frivolous lawsuits once and for all.

Re:Inconsistent Logic

[ShieldW0lf]

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.