While working on a Norwegian translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, which talk about the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles creativity, one thing occurred to me. The idea is to get the tax office to help us make more works enter the public domain and help us make it easier to clear rights to use copyrighted works.
The idea is partly based on the argument that copyrighted works are intellectual property, but the core requirement is that copyrighted work have value and the tax office like to collect their share from any value in a country. Sharing it here to let others comment on it and perhaps shoot it down.
Most valuables are taxed by the government. At least here in Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property, the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our stocks and other valuables are all added together. If the tax value of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some taxes for these values. And copyrighted work have value. It have value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the work. But it is not included in the tax calculations? Perhaps it should?
If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it will want a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the rights holders for the works, to be able to associate their values to the right citizen or company for tax purposes. If such database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very hard operation with todays copyright law.
If copyright causes the citizens to have to pay more taxes, they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let the work enter the public domain or at least state (in the database) that they do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to use the work. This will make it even easier to clear rights, and also increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.
The effect is that the tax office help us to get more work into the public domain and make it easier to get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public domain.
Why have this not happened yet? I am sure the tax office would like to tax copyrighted works.