blog/draft/2012-copyright-taxing.txt

   1 Title: Can we get the tax office to help us put copyrighted works in the public domain?
   2 Tags: english, freeculture, opphavsrett
   3 Date: 2012-11-17 09:00
   4
   5 <p>While working on a Norwegian translation of the Free Culture by
   6 Lawrence Lessig, which talk about the problems with todays copyright
   7 law and how it stifles creativity, one thing occurred to me.  The idea
   8 is to get the tax office to help us make more works enter the public
   9 domain and help us make it easier to clear rights to use copyrighted
  10 works.</p>
  11
  12 https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
  13
  14 <p>The idea is partly based on the argument that copyrighted works are
  15 intellectual property, but the core requirement is that copyrighted
  16 work have value and the tax office like to collect their share from
  17 any value in a country.  Sharing it here to let others comment on it
  18 and perhaps shoot it down.</p>
  19
  20 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
  21 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
  22 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
  23 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
  24 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
  25 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
  26 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
  27 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Perhaps it
  28 should?</p>
  29
  30 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it will want a
  31 database of all the copyrighted works and who are the rights holders
  32 for the works, to be able to associate their values to the right
  33 citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such database exist, it will
  34 become a lot easier to find out who to talk to for clearing
  35 permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very hard operation
  36 with todays copyright law.</p>
  37
  38 <p>If copyright causes the citizens to have to pay more taxes, they
  39 will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let the
  40 work enter the public domain or at least state (in the database) that
  41 they do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to use the work.
  42 This will make it even easier to clear rights, and also increase the
  43 amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
  44
  45 <p>The effect is that the tax office help us to get more work into the
  46 public domain and make it easier to get rights to use the works that
  47 have not yet entered the public domain.</p>
  48
  49 <p>Why have this not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office would
  50 like to tax copyrighted work values if they thought of it.</p>