IAMSLIC,
I found this interesting. I would take it a step further and make
the tax graded so that it is cheap to register for copyright during
the first 10 to 20 years, but then it increases in cost as the years
go by.
Joe
______________________
LEGAL SOLUTION DENIED, LESSIG SUGGESTS A COPYRIGHT TAX
He may have lost a difficult copyright case in front of the
Supreme Court, but Stanford University law professor
Lawrence Lessig is certainly not out of ideas. And Lessig
is wasting no time in his efforts to seek a practical
solution to the copyright issues that failed to attract a
legal solution. In a NEW YORK TIMES editorial, Lessig
suggested that Congress consider a copyright tax as a way
of balancing the public domain and the rights of content
owners. "The answer is suggested from the law governing
patents." Lessig wrote. "Patent holders have to pay a fee
every few years to maintain their patents. The same
principle could be applied to copyright." The tax, Lessig
added, should be small so as not to be a burden, "maybe $50
a work." Under Lessig's proposal, copyright owners who wish
to preserve their copyrights for revenue-generating
purposes could easily do so.
But if a copyright owner fails to pay the tax for three
years in a row, "then the work will enter the public
domain. Anyone would then be free to build upon and
cultivate that part of our culture as he sees fit." The
plan would also respond to another problem that Lessig sees
in the copyright system: the difficulty in identifying
copyright holders. "When the tax was paid, the government
would record that fact, including the name of the copyright
holder paying the tax. That way artists and others who want
to use a work would continue to have an easy way to
identify the current copyright owner." In a previous
interview in the July 15, 2002 issue of LIBRARY JOURNAL,
Lessig said that the copyright system was harmed by the
government's decision not to require registration to claim
copyright protections. "That means there is basically no
way to know when you look at a work if it is actually
protected, or who you have to get permission from to use
that work...the consequence is that it has become an
enormously expensive system to negotiate." For more, see
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/EAFAQ.html
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