If IP Is Property, Where Is the Property Tax? 691
nweaver writes "In a response to the LA Times editorial on copyright which we discussed a week ago, the paper published a response arguing: 'If Intellectual Property is actually property, why isn't it covered by a property tax?' If copyright maintenance involved paying a fee and registration, this would keep Mickey Mouse safely protected by copyright, while ensuring that works that are no longer economically relevant to the copyright holder pass into the public domain, where the residual social value can serve the real purpose of copyright: to enhance the progress of science and useful arts. Disclaimer: the author is my father."
It does... (Score:3, Informative)
"All utility patents which issue from applications filed on and after December 12, 1980 are subject to the payment of maintenance fees which must be paid to maintain the patent in force. These fees are due at 3 ½, 7 ½ and 11 ½ years from the date the patent is granted and can be paid without a surcharge during the "window-period" which is the six month period preceding each due date, e.g., 3 years to 3 years and six months. (See fee schedule for a list of maintenance fees.)
Failure to pay the current maintenance fee on time may result in expiration of the patent. A 6-month grace period is provided when the maintenance fee may be paid with a surcharge. The grace period is the 6-month period immediately following the due date. The Patent and Trademark Office does not mail notices to patent owners that maintenance fees are due. If, however, the maintenance fee is not paid on time, efforts are made to remind the responsible party that the maintenance fee may be paid during the grace period with a surcharge."
Patents have a "tax" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It isn't REAL property (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_valorem/ [wikipedia.org]
Re:It isn't REAL property (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
2. You don't need to "buy rights to it" to sell it.
Re:It isn't REAL property (Score:1, Informative)
property tax? (Score:2, Informative)
Also, the federal government doesn't *have* a property tax, only an income tax. Some *local* governments have property taxes, but again, only on real estate. Land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax#United_States [wikipedia.org]
What a moron.
Re:Wow... (Score:4, Informative)
If I recall correctly, it was put thus:
The owner appraises their own property, and pays tax on that value. However, anyone can come along and against the owners wishes buy the property - at which point the owner has two options: sell, or raise their valuation of the property to a price so high that nobody would want to buy it. However if they did this, they would be required to pay five years back taxes of the new, higher value.
One of the characters in the book (Zeb? I can't recall...) when it was pointed out to him that this was unfair, replied with "if some fool wants 5 hectares of useless, hilly land, we'll simply take his money and buy elsewhere..."
Discussing valuation would make sense (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, the basic concepts and concerns about copyright and related rights haven't changed much since the legislation was first introduced. those rights are still best explained by the original contract -- a limited in time monopoly to the author (so that they are pressured to monetize their invention), granted by the society, in exchange for the right of the society to use the knowledge for free when the monopoly expires.
What has changed is the power of the copyright owners to lobby and do marketing with the only goal of subverting the original contract and granting perpetual monopoly. Now they push for (and sometimes successfully get) new laws that extend the monopoly at the expense of the society.
in doing so, the copyright owners have, as far as i can see so far succeeded in the following:
- make the rules of copyright and related rights complex, enforcement costly, and in the process stifle the creative process.
- extended the protection, without being able to show much increase of creativity in exchange.
( if someone can point me to findings of the opposite, i'll be interested to read it, but as far as I can see, the effects of protection have been either detrimental or neutral to creativity, not positive. )
- diverted directly a large pool of resources into non-creative initiatives, such as lobbying, litigation, "don't steal" marketing campaigns, etc.. i don't really see how all this contributes.
- caused (via paid-for legislation) a large pool of resources to be diverted from useful technological development into useless stuff like copy protection, which eventually gets broken.
- since copyright enforcement the way it is seen these days requires close surveillance of the behaviour of copyrighted work consumers, the promoters of "intellectual property" have been pushing for a climate of constant monitoring, which has (especially in the last year or two) been embraced by more and more governments all over the world. once in place, who knows what these measures will be used for.
All these facts mean that any discussion that mentions "IP" without explaining the original contract, and emphasizing that "IP" is just an effort of the large (meh, small too) copyright owners to pirate the public domain that belongs to the society is either dishonest, or misguided.
I wish it was that uncommon. (Score:5, Informative)
I've lived in states where property taxes were aggressively enforced by municipalities on such varied things as artwork, out-of-state or un-plated vehicles (even if it was never registered or driven on public roads), even office furniture and equipment. In the U.S., sometimes they're administered -- and therefore vary -- at the state level, in other areas it's devolved down to the city/town/county level.
Some states (Florida that I'm aware of specifically) had/have an "intangible personal property" tax, specifically on things like stocks, bonds, bearer notes, money market funds, pretty much anything that's worth anything. Florida's was recently repealed, but it's not like the concept is totally foreign or anything.
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. All land and property seized and auctioned as a result of a criminal conviction has proceeds remitted back to the government, less any real debts such as taxes owed or mortgages that need paid much like a bankruptcy proceeding. A good example would be conviction under RICO statutes, drug smuggling and tax evasion. Once money is collected for the seized property, any 3rd parties with claim or title to that item can try to get their money back.
In most cases, the money would be retained by the State treasury or US Treasury.
Taxing only the long-term retention of property (Score:4, Informative)
I'm going to ignore patent here. Intellectual property is not all of one kind. I mean here mostly copyright and maybe also trademark, since these are about creativity, not discovery. But the issues are so different that raising them together is confusing.
My first thoughts on this matter went to the nature of real property that allows us to tax it. We don't tax the ownership of a refrigerator. Why should they be different. I have to assume it's that no one is busy making more of it, and so the mere holding of it is a tax on others, who might like to use it. In that sense, if real estate tax can be justified (and I might later argue that it cannot), then the justification is that you're taking up a critical resource from the get go.
In fact, though, copyright is not of that kind. If Gone With The Wind or Cinderella were not created by their respective authors, then those works are just simply not there at all. (You can make whatever claims about a million monkeys you want, but we're not taking more monkeys, we're slaughtering them, and I don't think they'll have the time.) New works of original authorship don't take up space. They are made out of nowhere and every new such work potentially enriches us. So taxing them would be like taxing someone for making new land. If someone could do that (on demand, I mean, not the way we're doing it in the artic with all that melting), I would think twice about taxing it. The making of new land seems a useful skill in a world that is ever more crowded.
While copyrights on newly authored works don't hurt anyone, there is ultimately a cost to the world of allowing one person to continue to hold copyright ownership beyond a reasonable limit, since at some point the world needs to build on what others do.
But the notion that someone should have to pay from the first day of creation for the right to have created that work is the most horrible and regressive tax I could imagine. It would create a ticking clock that would limit the bargaining power of new authors in dealing with publishers, who could afford to outlast the author and just publish the work when it fell into the public domain for non-payment. It would favor the big guy over the little guy. None of that is good.
The middle ground that I might consider would be a tax on long-term extension of copyright. Right now, we continue to extend the copyright term in order to accomplish that. But perhaps a middle ground that says that if Disney wants to extend its rights on a certain work, then it should have to pay heavily for that beyond the reasonable duration of 50 or so years that all authors might reasonably claim to allow them to pursue the use of their works within their own lifetime.
I might even make the claim that real property could use the same protection. If I work my lifetime to buy a property and then at the end of my lifetime lose my job and can't pay the taxes to sustain my ownership, why should I end up with an untaxed refrigerator which I can keep because it's my property, but not a house I can keep? Where is the incentive to work for something that can be taxed away as soon as you own it? I can totally understand a tax on the estate, since my heirs didn't earn the money, and a reasonable argument might be made that they should make their own fortunes. Passing along money to help a young person get started in life, an impoverished person break even in life, or an aging person retire comfortably is one thing, but ensuring that a dynastic fortune consolidates the power for one's progeny is another.
In a sense, the continued use by Disney of intellectual property is the same kind of moral issue. The Disney of today is enriched, perhaps unfairly, by the work of prior generations. Taxing that seems reasonable in a way that is different than taxing you or me fo
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Informative)
Parent just doesn't understand capital gains (Score:4, Informative)
Where do I put the million dollars on my tax return? Nowhere. No income means no income tax.
Now, had I accepted the offer, I would have realized capital gains of $1 million (probably split five ways), less the $0 cost basis in ICOYBNISPTMB. That would require me paying taxes -- likely at the long term capital gains rate, not as income, in the most plausible reading of my imaginary scenario.
Now, let's say that I reject the $1 million offer, and then subsequently sell to Timmy The Two Bit for $50,000 to prevent the bank from kicking me out of my house. In this case, despite the fact that you might feel my song is still worth $1 million, I would be assessed taxes on only $50,000 of capital gains. Even if the song made me a million in sales in the month before the sale, it would still be *fairly valued* at $50,000 after the sale actually takes place, assuming I am not engaging in tax fraud outside the scope of this hypothetical (for example, by doing a transaction which is not at "arms length" -- perhaps selling to a confederate with the promise to buy back in the next tax year and benefit somehow from a stepped up cost basis).
Re:two things (Score:3, Informative)
I've got news for you, income derived from sales is still income. In fact, almost all income is derived from sales. So your argument there is really stupid. Sales tax is always redundant. Sales tax almost always applies only to consumer sales. All consumer purchases are made with money that is part of a consumers income, all income is taxed.
"land property is an abstract concept"
Again, your ignorance really shows through here. All property is an abstract concept. Nothing you have is really yours. I could come and take anything you have from you, not just your land property. We use the concept of property to ensure that people don't waste as much time fighting about what they think is theirs. It's nice not to worry as much about defending your property, but the whole point of property is lost if you don't really own any of it, and you have to constantly earn an income in order to defend it. Property tax is a way that the government enforces social norms. It is impossible to own property without earning an income in order to pay the property tax. In a very fundamental way, this means that you are not free.
"all libertarian ideals result in, in the real world, is aristocracy, and an underclass of poor."
All economic systems result in this, even ones that claim to be designed not to like communism or socialism. In fact, you can find people immigrating to the US in droves from countries like these in order to be free from oppression. When ever someone promises you to protect you from these things they are lying to you, and intend to enslave you for their own purposes.
For the record, I am not a libertarian, I just think that any tax other than the income tax is stupid and/or deceptive.
Re:Parent just doesn't understand capital gains (Score:5, Informative)
That's an accurate description of Capital Gains taxes, but the discussion is about Property taxes. Maybe you don't pay property taxes where you live, but in many US states every year you have to pay a percentage of the assessed value of property you own as a tax. For example, in the NJ town where I live, I currently pay 16% of the assessed value of my home and land. (66% of that goes to the local school board, 20% goes to the county, and 14% goes to my town.) Property values are just being reassessed now after 25 years; with the new assessment, the tax rate will probably drop to 2.5% to 3%.
So, every year I pay 3% of the approximate value of my property, whether I sell it or not. No mansion for me; even if it was given to me for free, I couldn't afford to own it.
Trademark not copyright (Score:3, Informative)