Comment by throwawaycities | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaycities | Hacker News Reader

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throwawaycities

> Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax.

I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate.

Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.

> copyright holders do in fact declare ... and pay taxes on [IP]

Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there.

A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system.

Here's a similar (but different) idea from some IP law professors: https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf

It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge.

It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.

I think the suggestion is to put a buy it now price on everything so that it can be liberated.

It also creates a disincentive for holding onto IP without using it. Its kind of an LVT on intellectual property. I like it a lot.

Can you define "liberated" here?

Because I'm thinking the effect is the opposite on things that are already liberated - I'm thinking specifically of GPL protected freedoms...

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