Quote:
Originally Posted by jbjb
That's an interesting idea, but it's hard to see how it would work in practice, both in terms of what would be taxed (the holding of copyrights, or the income generated from them) and how much.
The income is already taxed by other means, and, at least in jurisdictions where the Berne Convention applies, copyright is automatic and does not require registration, so taxing holding of copyrights seems problematic. How do the authorities determine what copyrights you hold? Also, everything you or I have created, every letter we've written, every photo we've taken etc., is copyright. Should we be taxed on them?
/JB
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I took his meaning as a "tax", rather than a true tax. e.g. something along the lines of the old renewable copyrights, where you might get 20 years of copyright automatically, after which you can elect to renew the copyright by paying a fee. A relatively modest renewal fee of $1,000 every 10-20 years would cover the government's cost of maintaining a database of extended copyright works. This would allow popular works to continue to accrue benefit to the author, while encouraging the rest of works to enter the public domain and avoiding an orphan-limbo.
Unfortunately, you would probably need to revise or withdraw from the Berne Convention to bring something like that into effect.