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

[Microlith]

And not a new idea.

The last time this came up on slashdot, a point was made that until some income is derived from a copyrighted work it has no value. Thus taxes paid on such works are via income tax.

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:if ip = real p, how about some taxes

[Skevin]

In California Real Estate Law, your mouse, stapler, telephone, can of coke, screwdriver, keyboard, 2 monitors, flashlight, and spindle of blank DVDs are personal property, not real property. It's all "Chattel".

Real property is considered tangible and mostly immovable. The grandparent post's warehouse, factory, and store are real property.

Now before people complain that it must be "real" because they can touch it, I should point out that the word "real" in this case derives from the Spanish word for Royal. "Real Estate" doesn't mean an estate that's "fake"... it was traditionally land granted to you by the king, hence "Royal Land".

So, buildings and land are considered Real Property (and therefore fall under a slew of taxation laws). The chattel on our desks, including the desks themselves are Personal Property.

IANAL, but I'm having a problem with the claim that IP is "Real Property". What kind of claim is that? Is it legally clueless media companies (despite large legal teams) trying to enforce the idea that IP is "not fake"? Or are they trying afford the same protections for which we provide to "Royal Land"?

So MPAA/RIAA, which is it - are movies and music Personal Property, or Real Property? Answer carefully, because one answer will cause you give up several contested channels of distribution, and the other will let the State tax the hell out of your IP.

Solomon Chang

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

[chammel]

Right, Some states (Virginia mine) Personal Property is subject to taxation as well. Things like cars, boats, motorcycles, planes, livestock you are required to pay an assessed tax every year on the current value of the items.

Inconsistent Logic

[TheMeuge]

Would that mean that unless my business is profitable, I don't have to pay property taxes on the warehouse, factory, or store?

Does that also mean that if I own an unoccupied residence I don't have to pay property taxes on that?

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: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.

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

[sm62704]

Maybe in your country, but in the US you're dead wrong. The US Constitution says "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

If you rent a home, you have exclusive right to that home but you don't own it. If the founding fathers meant that one could own content, it would have read "granting ownership" instead of "securing for limited times the exclusive right".

I asked in another thread why, in this light, a law school had "intellectial property" in its name and Ray Beckerman (AKA "NewYorkCountyLawyer") responded (and I'm paraphrasing here) that it was just a name, not descriptive.

The efforlessness of reproduction does not nullify the ownership of content, but the US Constitution does.

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

[FredMenace]

It doesn't change the fact that you don't own the content. If you bought a book, you own the paper. If you bought a cd, you own the plastic. You don't have a right to distribute that content to 100s of thousands of people. The efforlessness of reproduction does not nullify the ownership of content.

However, the entire justification for copyright (and patent) in the first place was to benefit SOCIETY by making creative ideas MORE WIDELY AVAILABLE. It was considered at the time that an evil such as limited (in both duration and scope) monopoly on distribution would be a necessary incentive to encourage such publication (so that others could then benefit). That presumes that not only is paper expensive, but so are printing presses, etc. - expensive enough that some financial return would be required to pay for the cost of those supplies.

Fast-forward to today, where nearly any media can be created with low-cost (or free) tools and also distributed freely, and the argument about needing to recoup costs to distribute no longer has any meaning.

The point here is that copyright was not meant to reward having a good idea; it was meant to reward DISTRIBUTING that idea. (Similarly, patents are meant to reward PUBLICATION of ideas for others to learn from; that is, to facilitate new ideas building on old ones by making the details of the old ones explicitly public.)

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.