Slashdot Mirror
Richard Stallman Asks: Should Big Tech Be Taxed For Hurting Society? (stallman.org)
Richard Stallman weighed in Friday on what he calls "massive commercial surveillance of individuals," saying that the two camps arguing about it "both miss the point." First there's the trustbusters who want to break Big Tech companies into smaller firms too small to eliminate their competition or exert undue influences on regulators. Then there's those who urge carefully-calibrated regulations to ensure tech companies always act in a way that's good for society.
RMS writes: By arguing about whether to divide up the power that this data gives to businesses, or to regulate the use of it (perhaps nationalizing it), they miss the point that both alternatives destroy our privacy and give the state a perfect basis for repression.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
More generally, I think the idea of taxing companies for the magnitude of harm that they do (regardless of whether they broke any rules to do it) is a good one.
RMS writes: By arguing about whether to divide up the power that this data gives to businesses, or to regulate the use of it (perhaps nationalizing it), they miss the point that both alternatives destroy our privacy and give the state a perfect basis for repression.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
More generally, I think the idea of taxing companies for the magnitude of harm that they do (regardless of whether they broke any rules to do it) is a good one.
I agree, if people are harmed then some form of compensation should put in place. If a society is harmed that should be in the form of regulation and taxes.
But first you need to quantify and prove the harm.
The crazy uncle of open source talking about compromise? I never saw that coming.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."
Sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson. But one thing he did say was:
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground."
That's what we're seeing now.
Here's your "Trump free market":
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I got the idea from someone's Slashdot sig maybe around 2002 or so saying something like, "if it is intellectual property, shouldn't it be taxed"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.
Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.
Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments.
This approach could include a digital archive of all copyrighted works. Essentially, upon initial registration of a self-assessed value, a rights holder would be required to send in a digital copy of the work. This copy would be used to determine rights holders for works by means of a digital search. Any work not in this database would be presumed public domain. If the annual tax were not paid, th
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
the IRS should be abolished and a flat tax with a graph that gets steeper as the more money someone or some corporation makes the more percentage of it goes to taxes, no tax shelters and no tax exemptions for religion, especially rich TV preachers and other wacky religious schemes that are just a front to fleece the ignorant they should be taxed the most, start at just 5% for the poor and the scale gradually inclines upwards to 10% once someone makes enough money to live at a certain level above the cost of living, and the incline gets steeper the more money in acquired, basically dont be cruel and burdensome to the poor and quit coddling the rich
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Everyone has greed. It's not an admirable quality it's just something we all have.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Greed is a very admirable quality when it leads to you being warm and well fed and alive. People in the West are spoiled beyond their imagination to cope with reality.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What are the SI units that we should use to measure the "magnitude of harm"?
In a way that won't be abused to further OTHER forms of oppression, or isn't easily circumvented through legal or linquistic trickery.
Sure, everyone knows what harm FEELS like, but actually defining it for a legal framework is dangerous in the extreme.
Mainly due to all the special interests and the various axes they have to grind...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Get out of your myopic left/right ghetto. It's a false dichotomy.
St Richard is neither a leftist not a rightist. He stands tall for human freedom. No ugly partisan politics involved.
About 15 years ago rms and I actually exchanged some email. I dared to suggest that financial models actually mattered. On one hand, he convinced me that he could not care less about money, but on the other hand he did ask a rather insightful question that contributed quite a bit to my ideas for the Charity Share Brokerage. Doesn't exist yet, but among other applications it could help improve Slashdot and provide alternative funding for better journalism. Don't hold your breath, eh?
As regards his latest comments, he's about 1/3 of the way to reality now. I really think the reason he can't make more progress is because he has such a weak grasp of what freedom actually means. Corporate taxation certainly should consider harms, but the most important harm is obviously the destruction of freedom.
In phase one, the cure involves getting the soulless corporations out of politics. They need to stop bribing the cheapest politicians to help maximize their profits. Fake problem because there is NO solution. No amount of money will satisfy the problem of insufficient profit.
In phase two, taxation should be used to increase freedom. I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share. The goal is to make sure that every market has enough players to offer real choice. (Cf my sig.) It is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an inducement to reproduce by fission so excessively successful corporation becomes at least two competing corporations.
Caveat: There sometimes are natural monopolies that are going to wind up with overwhelming market shares. In such cases the higher tax rates are justified by (1) The cost of carefully regulating to monopoly to prevent abuse of the monopoly position, and (2) Research and even investment into ways to break the monopoly. If you can provide an example of a natural monopoly that lasted more than 50 years, please share it, because I know of none such, though I know of many examples of monopolies, natural and unnatural, that tried really hard to protect themselves as long as possible.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I had lunch with Richard Stallman, way back in 1996 through a mutual acquaintance in Harvard Square. He was talking about privacy and how companies were going to have access to realtime data about everything in your life through mobile devices. I thought he was a whiny, paranoid fool, and who cares. The fact is, he was way ahead of his time, and saw things way more clearly than almost anyone else.