A house takes up physical space. Intellectual property doesn't.

The reason we have property taxes is because maintaining the environment around the house costs money. There's no roads and sewers and schools for books.

there are a lot of costs involved with enforcing property rights. It's not sewers but it is legal departments, customs offices and law enforcement officers.

Also, a patent takes space by disallowing me to use the same kind of invention (even if I came up with it independently). And a copyright sometimes stops me from being able to use a "cultural common". They most definitely take space. And real estate property taxes are often supplemented by "road maintenance levies". They don't directly support the property's infrastructure when you really look into it.

Patents are a fairly large investment, plus they're a fixed life-span item. Although I'm largely against patents, fiddling with the fees associated with them won't help solve any problems.

Now when it comes to copyright enforcement, 99.99% of the copyrighted material out there is never formally published. It's source code, it's email, it's creative works produced and shared but never curated or packaged. How can you possibly tax all of that?

If it's not published, its protection comes mostly from not being seen (in private setting) or from trade secrets and associated laws.

If only want to use the tax as a way to make sure orphaned works can be shared, and patent trolls become unprofitable. I believe that an IP tax can help both. I think it is essential to force proper valuation of IP, and I think tying it to recovery (upside) and taxes (downside) is likely to give a proper evaluation.

It is not my intention to try to tax your own painting on your living room. I assume, by default, anything not listed, is valued at $0 for that year.

Do you understand that, regardless for copyrights or patents, your IP is not enforceable unless you can afford the court action?

I was going to mention that the enforcement cost is largely borne by the copyright holder, so there's a built-in tax there, but don't forget mechanisms like the DMCA provisions are cheap and can be applied with a heavy hand.

There's a solution to orphaned works: Reduce copyright to something like 25-50 years (plus life of creator?) and allow for one renewal, which requires a filing fee, for another 25-50 years. That's it. Suddenly all these orphaned works are liberated because it's not worth it for people to file.

Taxing based on valuation is absolutely, monstrously ridiculous. Many people write short fiction they publish online. Are you going to suggest they need to get an appraisal on their book, and then pay taxes on it? How many millions of people are going to review this and ensure that everything's tallied up correctly.

Orphaned works are a problem, but taxing them is not a solution.

> Are you going to suggest they need to get an appraisal on their book, and then pay taxes on it?

I keep repeating (and you keep ignoring) that I want no such thing, except when they expect damages for copyright infringement.

Taxing based on valuation is what is effectively done for every kind of property. If IP is property, there is no reason it should be exempt. And if it isn't property, it's about time we stop treating it as such.