It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little - and have states enforcing your rights for free - while a piece of land pays property taxes.
The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so.
This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
Often the property is never found and returned.
* You declare your property’s worth.
* You pay IP taxes on that worth.
* You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves.
And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M.
Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
But they don’t?
Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property taxes don’t fund that. The income tax that we all pay, including the IP holders, do the funding.
Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income taxes fund that, not property taxes.
People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case.
The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case.
We all get legal protections for our property.
It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210
capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally. These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.
The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.
Actually seems a bit weird to find a tax situation in the U.S that seems less beneficial to the person paying the tax than many other countries.
A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.
Should I be forced to pay something every year to prevent some AI company from bidding $1 and taking ownership?
Your current situation is a prime example of the failure of current copyrights. You aren't incentivised to produce any new art, it was unearned as you weren't the author, and yet still the state enforces the copyright for you.
Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.
I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.
If what matters is actually revenue, well, revenue is already taxed when it’s incurred. Suppose there is no future revenue, do I get the tax back eventually?
With no offense to you or your novel; I would appraise an unpublished novel by an unknown author at something like $100, which might be too high. Some turn out to be worth much more, but most will be produce $0 or less for the author's estate.
Like what is the McDonalds tradework worth? What is tbe stream of payments?
For a copyrighted work, you would examine the work, find similar works, what were the stream of payments for similar works. Take into account age of the work, the artist's other works, etc.
McDonald's does hold copyright in many things. But many of those are unlikely to produce significant income; training videos, promotional materials, etc don't tend to sell for much if at all.
If you needed to appraise a new song by a popular artist, you could do a reasonable job by looking at the stream of payments generated by their average song, and projecting future payments based on the general trends of payments for songs over time. You might also consider current popularity of the artist/song and how that impacts longevity; songs don't acheive many sales initially often hit zero sales and never come back, whereas songs that chart tend to have continued, if meager, sales for a long time.
But, ok, copyright.
Who exactly is going to do these audits, find comparable works, etc? For every single copyright (500,000-ish registered in the US per year, far more unregistered but real copyrights)?
And you’d need to audit all existing copyrights… that song may have produced very little revenue, but then a big artist covers it, and the composition rights (but not performance rights) are suddenly worth a lot more.
It all seems like an exercise in applying engineering to law, which never goes well.
If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill for the comment you have written.
Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to decide how a tweet should be taxed
It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention.
Although the US was not a signatory until 1989.
It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like most European languages, there are close relationships to the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this case not.
In some countries taxes are annual.
In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land. You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year.
However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those.
In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing..
(And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)