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.

Comments

Define harm

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Define harm

[Solandri]

More importantly, you need to define how you will determine what constitutes "harm" for future cases. Otherwise some future government could use these same taxes to punish Richard Stallman for "harming" society based on their own standards.

The problem I see with trying to define data collected from Facebook and Google users as "harm" is that the data was given up willingly. For a contract to be valid, there has to be consideration - both parties have to give up something of value to the other. In the case of big data, the user gave up their data in exchange for some service. Likewise, the company gave up that service in exchange for the data. Both sides gave and received consideration, making it a valid contract. (This is why you often hear that economics is not a zero-sum game. You can make a zero-sum exchange of goods and services, which are a net benefit to both parties. e.g. I have two water bottles, you have two hamburgers. If we are both hungry and thirsty, trading one water bottle for one hamburger results in a net benefit to both of us, even though the amount of physical goods between the two of us remains the same.)

While giving up something of value could in absolute terms be considered "harm", the fact that it was given up in exchange for something received, and the fact that the person made the exchange willingly constitutes evidence that in their own opinion the exchange was a net benefit to themselves, not harm. And the justification for any tax meant to counteract the harm goes out the window.

Contrast this to surveillance and data collection done without the user's knowledge or consent. In that case, the user is unwittingly giving up the data. And if they knew the data were being collected or disseminated they might decide the exchange was not a benefit to themselves, and decide not to make the deal. In that case, you can argue that harm is being done to the users. Such is the case for companies losing data to hackers due to their lax security.

Re:But he is a socialist & Bernie Supporter

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Tax Copyright Too!

[Paul Fernhout]

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

Re:Tax Copyright Too!

[markdavis]

Interesting post.

>"Incidentally, this approach can be applied to patents as well, "

Of course, the approach could ALSO be made on having children. They pose a huge cost to society too- schools, police, social services, amber alerts, JV, AFDC, Medicaid. But instead, we do the exact opposite (discounts, tax writeoffs, etc) :)

the US Tax system is corrupt and broken

[FudRucker]

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

Re: Slashdot Answers!

[jedidiah]

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.

And just how to?

[chrism238]

What are the SI units that we should use to measure the "magnitude of harm"?

Re:Stallman is an irrelevant, whiny communist

[jobiwankanobi]

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.