On 9 Nov 2008 at 12:50, Brian Holtz wrote: > Like all brilliant ideas, this one is infuriatingly obvious > in hindsight -- a straightforward application of a hardcore > bid-em-off-the-land version of the land value tax. Some > quick web searching reveals no prior art; did you make this > up just now?
I made it up some time ago. Like all obviously good ideas, I expect it has some obscure precedents that have been buried somewhere. > I would consider modifyng the bid-em-off-the-property > provision in the same way that I would modify it for land > (and maybe orbits but not spectrum). The "bid-em-off" approach only works where legitimate property is not married to privilege. That is, we take the trouble of assessing land as a protection to those who have made significant improvements to land, or who have committed their business, residential or recreational activities to particular locations in ways that would cause them to suffer if they were outbid. That said, there is a good argument for only assessing improved and occupied land, and requiring holders of vacant, unoccupied or grossly underused land to self-assess and subject themselves to the risk of being outbid. > People who can't pay their tax can let it accumulate (with > interest) as a lien against the eventual sale or transfer of > the property, and the lien is capped at the market value of > the property. That has some problems, as it gets government into the lending business. Let private lenders handle this (once their money-creating privileges are properly addressed.) > However, market value of patents is harder to assess, and the > escalating patent value tax rate would create an incentive > to just let the tax accumulate and then abandon the patent > when the rate is too high for anyone to want to bid for it. > So I might worry that an undercapitalized inventor will not > be able to defend a patent if he and a predatory bidder > understand its value more than the market does (or else the > inventor could get a loan from the understanding market). You are correct, but that is already the case with inventors, and would probably be no worse under a patent tax. I believe the solution lies in reform of the court system, although that is outside my expertise. > However again, I'm confident that markets are good enough at > valuing patents that this wouldn't be a big problem. > > So I don't yet see any problem with this idea. It could be > applied to copyrights too, to the extent that one even > believes in copyright. Perhaps. Copyrights are now extended to 75 years from the death of the author, largely at the behest of lobbyists for the Disney Corporation. Logically, the copyright term should attach to the publication date, without regard to the longevity of the author. Perhaps a copyright tax could kick in after 25 years or so. The essential difference between a patent and a copyright is that the former is a discovery of a new process, analogous to an explorer's discovery of new land. Both the land and the process were there to be discovered, and would likely have been discovered by someone else not long afterward. A copyright, on the other hand, is a creative work, and is narrowly defined as such. While one may not steal the actual work, broad similarities, such as novels with similar plots or music with similar phrasings, are not copyright violations even when their styles are clearly derivative. -ds > Dan Sullivan wrote at dfc_talk: > > Enter the patent value tax. The holder of a patent would be required to > self-assess its value, with the stipulation that anyone could purchase > the patent at that value. The purchaser would have to honor contracts > into which the previous patent holder had entered, to the extent that he > could not increase the royalty charge or impose other restrictions. > > The contracts themselves would have to be public contracts. That is, if > one producer is allowed to apply a patented invention to a particular > type of product at a particular royalty rate, then all producers would > be allowed to produce the same product at the same royalty rate. > > For the first year a patent is granted, the tax rate could well be zero. > It would then gradually increase until, at the year of expiration, it > consumes nearly the entire amount of the patent's self-assessed value. > Naturally, the value of the patent would decrease as the tax rate > increases and the expiration date approaches.
