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Comment by xmodem | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's some sort of middle ground here. Perhaps copyright extensions should be able to be applied for on a per-work basis, and to succeed, you have to demonstrate that you're still profiting from the work.

Let Disney have indefinite copyright on mickey mouse. But let's not lose the last century of our history.

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I think it's simplest to tax copyrighted intellectual property like other property such as real estate. If you want to maintain it beyond some standard copyright term. (and make that term shorter than it is today)

So if one wants to continue to hold some copyrighted material out of the public domain for longer than the original term, sign up on a form to list the property. The gov't audits the value of that property and takes some small percentage of that value.

This is an interesting solution that I haven't heard before. It certainly seems to solve some of the problems with current copyright, but how do you evaluate the value of a copyrighted work? Off the top of my head, taxing recent past sales of it won't work because a rights holder can just sit on a work keeping it from public domain for free (status quo), and estimating some sort of earning potential doesn't seem great either.

You could just make it more and more expensive to extend copyright.

Ie first twenty years are free, the n-th year after will cost you some multiple of n USD. (Or make it grow quadratic or exponential.)

Or you can get a fair valuation pretty easily: let Disney post a value for Mickey Mouse they'd want to be taxed on. Lower value means less tax. But the self-declared value comes with the obligation to sell to any comer who offers that much in cash.

You don't even have to force them to license it. If they specify a low value, then the damages in the copyright lawsuit should be commensurately lower.

Leaving it to the courts is an interesting idea.

There should be a requirement that the work is actually being sold. Otherwise what good is the copyright doing anyone? That way you can't sit on a work.

Maybe even a requirement that it sells decently.

An easy formula is just based on the age of the work. So you get (say) 20 years for free, but after that you have to pay more. Disney wants Mickey Mouse? They'd have to pay millions per year. If it's not worth it to them, they can just not pay it.

I'm a fan of this, it seems easier to apply and harder to hide how much you say you're profiting from it. It also represents the trade with the public for protection. The longer it's out of the public domain, the more you have to pay the public.

You could have this increase as a percentage each year, allowing a slow ramp up and much higher fees for something that's been kept for 100 years.

But if they just sit on it and don't sell it, who cares?

I've heard an interesting proposal that has the owner set a value for the work, and the tax calculation is based on that estimate. To keep the owner from setting the value too low, they are required to sell if anyone offers to purchase the copyright at the owner-set price.

I was discussing copyright last night and proposed this exact same idea -- declare intellectual property to be, well, property, and subject it to a property tax. Require disclosure of what percentage of your revenue was due to that IP (or what percent of your total worth, or similar) and use that to determine the value of the IP. Then tax that value just like we tax real estate.

Rather than demonstrating that you are profiting from the work (which seems a low bar to clear), a sliding scale might be a better middle ground. Something like (years for illustration only; personally I'd probably go for shorter terms):

- 0-20 years post publication - free, automatic protection (i.e. basically what we have now)

- 20-30 years post publication - nominal fee and continuous (yearly?) registration required to maintain protection (to prove active use/interest)

- 30-40 years post publication - large-ish fee and registration required (most works would probably be 'abandoned' to public domain here unless continuing to be commercially successful or backed by a large corp.)

- 40+ years post publication - increasing fee each year indefinitely. Disney et al. can keep major works protected if they wish, but most works will enter the public domain

And then your problem becomes infinite profit for finite work. If you want to talk about things that break economics, its a perpetual money machine. It just changes the game to making sure any potentially popular idea in the future must be rigorously defended under copyright forever. You know, like what people do with patents right now, which is also a destructive and horrible IP mess all on its own.

If we have to choose between giving Disney the exclusive right to a perpetual money machine, or to give all copyright owners the same, because Disney is so ingrained into the governing oligarchy, then I think the former choice would be better for society overall.

Indeed, the choice seems to be give Disney a perpetual money machine, vs. give Disney a perpetual money machine AND wreck the public domain.

From what I understand, giving Disney an exception would be a violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

It wouldn't need to necessarily be an exception, but it could be, as suggested elsewhere in the thread, an appropriate property tax... If this stuff is indeed "intellectual property" then it should have property taxes.

People who don't pay the tax can involuntarily donate to the public domain after the previous reasonable term of say, 56 years after creation.

Interestingly enough Peter Pan has a perpetual copyright in the UK. All proceeds goes to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. There's a special Act of Parliament for it it.

> And then your problem becomes infinite profit for finite work. If you want to talk about things that break economics, its a perpetual money machine.

Have you heard of discounting and present value calculations?

Even an infinite stream of (say constant) income is worth only a finite amount in the present.

It would be interesting to see if a "proof of profitability" requirement would affect Hollywood's practice of denying profitability through accounting tricks:

http://www.slashfilm.com/lucasfilm-tells-darth-vader-that-re...

Or would they just come up with new tricks?

The simplest thing might be to treat intellectual property like other property and tax it for ever year you own it.

Another option, make it cost more money each year you want to keep the copyright.

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