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boomlinde | on: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
Real property owners also pay tax on their income. Income is taxed. Real property is taxed. Intellectual property is not.
dghlsakjg | parent | next
Taxing copyright ownership is effectively impossible.

Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill for the comment you have written.

Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to decide how a tweet should be taxed

simonh | parent | next
I'm in the UK. Simply owning land does not incur taxes here, we don't have land value taxes. You pay capital gains tax on profits selling land. There are annual taxes on buildings such as council taxes on houses, specifically to pay for municipal services, but not generally on land.

If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.

closewith | root | parent
There are some analogues of a land tax in the UK. Council tax for residential property, rates for businesses, and the upcoming mansion tax.
brookst | parent | next
IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land.

It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.

toast0 | root | parent | next
Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of payments it will generate; take the net present value using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate.

Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.

I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.

closewith | root | parent
This is actually a solved problem. It is self-assessed valuation with compulsory sale at declared value, known as the Harberger Tax.
boomlinde | root | parent | next
The effect of a Harberger tax on intellectual property would probably be an upwards transfer of ownership of intellectual property, from people who can't afford to pay taxes on whatever those 100,000x more wealthy are willing to pay.

A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.

ralferoo | root | parent | next
This is only a solution if you think it's fair to have a regular ownership tax on top of the tax paid when purchasing / selling something.
closewith | root | parent
It's a solution to the problem raised by the GP - how to fairly value IP.

This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.

bryanrasmussen | root | parent
the solution to how to fairly value IP was provided by the owner, capital gains tax happens on sale of IP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210

capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally. These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.

closewith | root | parent
Profits from property sales are often tax as CGT. It's only a select few jurisdictions that don't tax property sales, often with both CGTs and stamp duties.

The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.

wang_li | root | parent
That's a dumb system as it doesn't account for the fact that a piece of property's value can change over time. You write a book, you have to declare its value prior to knowing it's value to consumers. If you aren't independently wealthy already you will never be able to become wealthy by writing books, paintings, songs, etc. as you will have to declare their value quite low in order to pay taxes on them. If it becomes popular the publishing company comes along and forcibly buys it from you for the low value you had to put on it because you couldn't pay the tax, then raises it's value far beyond what the author could afford and profits from the movies rights and etc.
bryanrasmussen | parent | next
Real property is taxed, but often you do not pay capital gains on sold real property (this "often" of course varies by jurisdiction, so yes in lots of places you may pay some if the conditions are right), when selling intellectual property you often (same proviso as before, only inverted) pay capital gains.
kube-system | parent
Real property is sometimes taxed. Certain uses/users are partially exempt from taxation, and some uses/users are entirely exempt. It is not legal to rob these properties, nor should it be.