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 isn’t enforcing your rights for free - you still have to hire a lawyer and pay legal expenses yourself.
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.
Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that. I fully support copyright enforcement being funded by intellectual property taxes:
* 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.
> Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that.
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.
Criminal cases aren't a substitute for civil suits, not for copyright... or for any other type of loss.
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.
Many states do collect restitution funds from revenues generated by the work of encarcerated people, and those funds do go to victims. I don't know that that applies to copyright infringement, but it is possible to get some recovery from criminal proceedings.
If a criminal case ever happens, it is a possibility that restitution can be awarded. But generally, if somebody's infringing your copyright and you want to seek damages, you need to bring a civil case yourself. Well over 99% of copyright cases are civil.
Sometimes for physical property the police take it and the owner can get it back from them. That much is sometimes free. My motorcycle got returned, but if I wanted compensation for the substantial damage done to it I would have had to get it from the thief.
> It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little
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.
I'm in the UK. Simply owning land does not incur taxes here, we don't have land value taxes. You pay capital gains tax on profits selling land. There are annual taxes on buildings such as council taxes on houses, specifically to pay for municipal services, but not generally on land.
If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
And I think that makes sense because residences impose costs on local services. However if I write a novel aged put it on my bookshelf, or if I paint a picture ad put it on my wall, I’m not imposing a cost on anyone just because these might have some theoretical value. How would their value even be measured?
IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land.
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.
Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of payments it will generate; take the net present value using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate.
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.
So of I write a novel and never publish it, how should its value be calculated?
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?
If you never publish it, and it's never published after your death; objectively it produced no income and has a monetary value of $0.
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.
McDonald's trademark is not a copyright, so that's a different process. The trademark is appraisable too, but it's trickier because trademark doesn't expire and the stream of payments may not end. You can look at the history of franchise payments as one measure, and consumer revenues as another measure, but you'll need to discount for the actual product. The corporation broadly accounts for the value of the trademark and other things in Goodwill on the balance sheet.
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.
Trademarks are IP; I thought we were taking about a generalized IP tax.
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.
The effect of a Harberger tax on intellectual property would probably be an upwards transfer of ownership of intellectual property, from people who can't afford to pay taxes on whatever those 100,000x more wealthy are willing to pay.
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.
It's a solution to the problem raised by the GP - how to fairly value IP.
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.
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.
Profits from property sales are often tax as CGT. It's only a select few jurisdictions that don't tax property sales, often with both CGTs and stamp duties.
The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.
That's a dumb system as it doesn't account for the fact that a piece of property's value can change over time. You write a book, you have to declare its value prior to knowing it's value to consumers. If you aren't independently wealthy already you will never be able to become wealthy by writing books, paintings, songs, etc. as you will have to declare their value quite low in order to pay taxes on them. If it becomes popular the publishing company comes along and forcibly buys it from you for the low value you had to put on it because you couldn't pay the tax, then raises it's value far beyond what the author could afford and profits from the movies rights and etc.
Real property is taxed, but often you do not pay capital gains on sold real property (this "often" of course varies by jurisdiction, so yes in lots of places you may pay some if the conditions are right), when selling intellectual property you often (same proviso as before, only inverted) pay capital gains.
Real property is sometimes taxed. Certain uses/users are partially exempt from taxation, and some uses/users are entirely exempt. It is not legal to rob these properties, nor should it be.
IPR is a form of incentive for creators in service of betterment of the society (it also could be detrimental like Mein Kempf though). On the other hand real estate does not need such extra incentives. Need or greed is enough.
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.
Council taxes could be considered propertie taxes, I guess, though I've always thought of them as paying for rubbish collection & etc.
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.)
They're not exactly proportional to the value of the property though are they? There's folks in London with multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in council tax than a family home in the suburbs.
That's just in reference to the technique itself. They're basically saying it's okay for Google to use distillation to train Gemini N Flash using Gemini N-1 Pro (which they do).
Back in the peak-paper days - when the Sunday newspaper was for the man "smart enough to read it and strong enough to carry it", and the Computer Shopper magazine vied with phone directories for thickness - you could go into a gas station and pick up a paperback copy of the CIA World Factbook, usually from a shelf also sporting the Rand McNally road maps.
> Its a demonstration of wealth. This is called Veblen good
Just the other day I was reminded of the poor little "I am rich" iOS app (a thousand dollar ruby icon that performed diddly squat by design), which Apple deep-sixed from the app store PDQ.
Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...
Assuming this is about Harju, it seems the author read "245 million sq m" and assumed the m was miles, not metres.
So the already large 24,500 hectare farm became a ludicrous 245 million square mile multi-planetary behemoth.
Reading sq m as square miles is a surprisingly common error in the US, but usually gets caught before production or publication because the result is orders of magnitude out.
Quoted straight from the piece, as written by dude who just made one of the smallest countries around have abandoned farms larger than the whole world ...
But many people are really like this, no notion whatsoever of order of magnitude plausibility. Has to be beaten out of engineering students, but I suppose the majority of the population is untreated.
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