Or, beyond 28 years, if the work is not released to the public domain, have an annual copyright tax based upon a "fair market" assessment of the property. To keep assessment real, perhaps let there be an auction starting at 2x the taxed value.
Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing?
Right now, especially without registration required anymore, there is no burden to owning copyrights "passively". If they had to enumerate and price them, that alone may make it worth shedding some of them.
> Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing?
I've come to the conclusion that this sort of property tax (on everything, including land, equipment, trademarks, and copyrighted material) is the only kind of tax that actually makes sense economically. Fundamentally, "property" is one person or entity taking something from society as a whole (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence); "taxation" is its natural inverse: society as a whole taking something back from a person or individual (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence). There's a pleasant symmetry that the people who have benefit the most from the setup of society should be the ones who fund it; and that in a sense, ownership must be continually "justified".
