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Comment by LukeShu | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'd be happy with a short term and unlimited renewals; you just have to renew it. Shortish base-term of 10 years or so that works as currently, but after that you need to renew every 10 years. Let the special interests that currently lobby to extend copyright just spend that money renewing; don't hold everyone else's stuff hostage from the public domain too. And by forcing them to actually file renewals, the forgotten works in buyouts will slip through to the PD; there will be no questions of "who actually owns these rights" for old works, just check who renewed it.

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Personally I'd like to see something similar, but with taxes (perhaps 2% or so) paid on the value of the property. Who sets the value? You do! With the caveat that anyone can buy a perpetual license to do anything they want with the property if they pay its declared value.

I’ve been wanting this for years! Ever since I saw an econ paper that estimated the majority of copyrights wouldn’t be renewed if they even cost $1. It’s such an elegant solution. It can still be gamed, but at least it provides some price feedback in the system.

“Radical Markets” is the book I stole the idea from, although they advocate for complete ownership transfer instead of perpetual licensing, which seems a bit unfair to me.

I’ve heard this idea before on HN in regards to reforming patent law also. I LOVE this idea. Pay a small tax on the stated value, but also allow others to buy rights at that stated value.

When filing for a patent or copyright, say “I believe this is worth $1m” — so you pay a $20k tax on filing/renewing it. If you’re not confident that your idea can actually redeem 2% of that stated value, then maybe it’s too risky to actually be worth that much. So you say it’s worth $100k because you can definitely make at least $2k from it.

But if you’re really only confident in making $2k from your idea, and someone else is allowed to “buy license to use your material” at $100k, you’d be absolutely floored to make so much money from that idea. So if you end up being wildly successful, you’ve still made a lot of money (and can keep using your idea), but now competition/reuse is allowed past your stated value threshold.

What if you have an excellent idea but don't have any money with which to 'secure' it? Or is that more something a patent is meant to handle.

The original idea for this tax structure is for land. Namely, a piece of land can only be used for a limited set of purposes at a time.

As a society, we want land put to valuable use. We don't want a piece of super valuable land (could be producing food, etc) that is dormant simply because someone refuses to sell.

But we also don't want to be the arbiter of what counts as valuable. So you state the value of the land and pay the tax on that value. If someone else can extract more value, they can buy it from you at the stated price.

I think this sort of tax makes less sense for intellectual property, because unlike land many people can use the same idea at once.

The reason I like it for IP is that the cost to society to enforce IP rights is pretty high.

Not just directly (e.g. costs to grant patents, hear court cases etc.) but indirectly - people can make things completely on their own and end up being sued for it because of an obscure patent violation. This has a chilling effect on innovation in general.

Because of this, making the person with the special right have to pay for the costs of that right seems fair.

If you’re sure you can make $100m on your idea, it should be easy to find an investor to give you $2m. If you can’t find an investor to give you that much, maybe your idea is riskier than you thought and therefore not actually worth that much.

I agree that the uncertainty over whether works are actually copyrighted is a major concern, and one that I wish we could fix independent of the issue of copyright duration.

However, concentration of valuable IP in the hands of the few is also a problem. Limited duration copyright provides the greatest benefit to individual authors (by maximizing their bargaining power while limiting the bargaining power of IP-hoarders through erosion) and the public domain.

> And by forcing them to actually file renewals, the forgotten works in buyouts will slip through to the [public domain].

I can’t see how that would work now that the data is digitised and the filings are completely automated. At best it might work for some older music, but it wouldn’t work for anything produced after the rule was introduced because services would be created to automatically do the filing for artists.

> Honestly, I'd be happy with a short term and unlimited renewals; you just have to renew it.

An immeasurable treasure of music and other works of art in the public domain would still be in the hands of these rentiers on that basis.

You can work around this by making the renewal price increase exponentially (or geometrically) the more times you renew it.

Also make it public record on the internet. Current copyright owners must renew with proof for anything over 10 years old. Boom.

Maybe not on the Internet, but go back to old Library of Congress rules.

You used to need to file a copy with the Library of Congress to obtain copyright. Then they'd start filing it, but immediately taking it out on loan, and lose it. Then they'd "file" it and take it out on loan before ever giving it over; the copy for the library never existed. Then they decided to just give up on the farce, and not make you file.

To renew a work, you should have to actually file a (non-DRM) copy with the Library of Congress, and not take it out on loan. If it's important enough to renew, it's important enough for the Library to demand an actual copy.

Now, I don't support having to file with the Library of Congress for the initial copyright, that'd disproportionately hurt independent people who publish on the Internet.

I mean I'm not opposed to this, but if you're claiming something is your copyright, there should be online carbon copies of it so anybody can confirm and verify.

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