Public Domain Enhancement Act (2003)

I'm troubled by this in certain ways. For example, what is a "work"?

Is a "work" a whole body of source code, for example like an application that I write? What if I contributed a series of diffs, without a CLA, and so I hold a copyright to multiple fragments of "works", am I on the hook for $1/apiece?

This hurts anyone who doesn't see revenue or monetize their works. They need to pay just to protect them? What about a person just innocently taking snapshots on their phone, and sharing them to Facebook? They're supposed to know, and shell out, for this tax now? Photos are free, but now it could really add up just to protect your copyright from pirates.

Anyone releasing F/OSS or Creative Commons works, they'd still need to pay up. A freely-licensed work is still copyrighted. GNU GPL? Pay us $1. MIT license? Pay $1. No work too small? Heaven forbid.

Check the TOS on your favorite forums and social media sites. You may retain the copyright to anything you post or comment there. HN doesn't seem to have an assignation of copyright, so is it safe to assume that we retain it?

I myself am a pathological example already: with over 60,000 Wikipedia edits, I hold the copyright to every single one! I licensed them all freely to Wikipedia! Now, I may not much care if they lapsed into the PD, but some of us may, and I don't know anyone willing to pay $60,000/year in taxes, especially for many edits that are negative bytes in length. Wow!

Wow! I didn't know about this initiative.

I like the idea of using a $1 tax to incentivize right holders to consider and reconsider whether to hold on to their rights. Encourages some self curation of long tail content, rather than rewarding content hoarding — you never know, might become valuable, or quantity is always good mindset.