Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
Gratitude to the State for allowing creators to temporarily keep what they created? Maybe we should afford land owners this same wonderful right? Life + 70 and your land reverts back to the State.  |
We do something very similar in the UK in the form of death duties (inheritance tax). If, when you die, the value of your estate exceeds a relatively modest value (currently £325,000 - about half a million dollars), then your heirs have to pay 40% tax on the entire value of the estate. This means that each new generation of heirs to the property has to come up with 40% of its value in order to keep it, so in three generations (roughly the length of a copyright term) the government receives rather more than the estate's value in the form of tax.