Tax patents. Progressively. Start from say $USD 1000 per year and double each year until the patent holder decides to not pay and gives the patent to the public domain. Feel free to add a couple of free years in the beginning or tweak some other parameters to suit needs of different industries.
I think a similar approach would work with copyright, too. Only with a grace period.
Say, your original copyright lasts for 20 years since creation of your work. If you want to prolong it, you can, but you must register your work and pay a yearly fee that starts somewhere around USD 5, but grows exponentially to reach millions after 50 years and billions after 100 years.
I used to think this too, until I thought about it more. The biggest issue with taxing copyright is eventually only the biggest companies can afford it. Imagine if Disney could simply wait until Lucas couldn't afford the Star Wars copyright anymore, and then just acquire the copyright. So now Lucas gets nothing and the government gets billions. Everyone loses in that situation.
I think copyrights should be taxed like income. File a special return showing the income that copyright got you, and pay a percent. Audit it like the IRS audits taxes. Make it a tax on top of income tax. So for example Disney would pay their normal taxes, and then additional tax for income earned from Mickey, Donald, Darth Vader, etc. Maybe allow them to group copyrights for simplicity.
Then do patents the same way. Pay a tax based on how much you make from a patent.
And then once you do that you can get fancy. Allow anyone to use a patent and pay the tax, but have their tax get split with the original patent holder, or increase the tax and have to extra go to the original holder. Then invocation isn't stifled anymore. If you can make an e-ink reader and make it profitable enough to cover the tax, then great, everyone wins!
Expiration of copyright would have to mean instant and irreversible transition to public domain. In that case, Disney would have to pay reasonable money to Lucas, so that he does not let his copyright expire out of spite.
Also, 20-30 years of automatic or very cheap copyright mean that the original creator has a lot of time to make some money off it. Although there are works that only became "hits" after decades, this is a fairly rare situation.
For copyrights, why is this a problem? Consider the early copyright lengths of like 20 years + 20 years after the author's death. We're now at far, far, faaar beyond that.
What if we did 20 + 20 and then every year after it, we charge $X and then geometrically or exponentially increase the price.
Yes, it would be a tax to Disney; but, if Disney is willing to spend $2B in 2010 to keep Steam Boat Willie and then $2.5B in 2011, I think that's a fine tax for them to get to keep it.
I don't think most people had _any_ problem with the 20 + 20 or similar patterns. They have issues with the, what is it now, 120 years?
Just renegotiate that. I'm convinced that copyrights > 25 years are not a limited time via the constitution, and thus the treaty isn't constitutional in the first place. Of course I'm not in a position to do anything about this.
The Copyright Act of 1790, just a few years after the constitution was signed, enabled a 28 year copyright grant (14 years with a 14 year extension.) So unless you think the copyright laws haven't been legal since their inception, you probably want to bump your number up at least five years.
Edit: Also, if you're interested in this argument, and IIRC the most recent Supreme Court opinion on it is Eldred v Ashcroft (2003).
This is how it works. The prices are different in different countries. Most countries have renewals due every year. Many countries have increasing costs each year, and costs vary between tens of dollars and thousands of dollars. Costs are also categorized between "Micro", "Small", and "Large" entities. Different countries use different numbers of these categories. The US uses all three.
Some countries have fees per claim in the patents.
In the US, the renewals are only due 3 times, every 3.5 years after the grant of the patent. The renewals cost $1,600 for the first renewal, $3,600 for the second, and $7,400 for the third. Those are for large entities. Small entities are half the cost, and micro are 1/4th the cost.
Renewal fees, world wide, are a non-negligible part of a legal department's fees, and abandonments do happen before they otherwise would because of the cost to keep non-useful patents around.
As a commentor noted, there are already fees to maintain a patent.
The problem with the approach is that the fees are often trivial for big companies, who may not think twice about maintaining a patent "just in case" even when they are not using the patent.
Yeah. Two potential options to fix sitting on unused patents are to increase annuity fees until they hurt, or to enact a compulsory licensing scheme.
I'm pretty ambivalent either way. I do think that compulsory licensing schemes are hard to manage but if done right would be extremely valuable. Compulsory licensing of patented pharmaceuticals saves lives.
Doubling the tax each year will make the tax non-trivial for even the largest corporations in reasonably short timeframe. You may want to check what e.g. my initial proposal (1000 bucks first year, double that annually) would yield in say 30 years.
Makes sense. Sorry for my miss the first time. :-)
So what this means is that the small players would give up before the big players even though the invention otherwise took the same amount of investments or has the same potential for reward back.
The shape of the exponential curve makes the time difference between small and big players giving up relatively small (if that difference exists in the first place.) Both have reasonably long time with reasonably low patent tax to develop the commercials before the tax starts really kicking in. The tax with my initial numbers breaks one million USD p.a in 10 years and 10 millions in 14 years.
