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Comment by digikata | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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