The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ian Burrell:

Dave, it is quite possible the ISPs that Google connects don't pay anything to exchange the traffic that Google generates.

There are three ways to access other networks on the Internet. One, you sell access to customers. Two, you pay for access (or transit). Three, you peer with another network and agree to exchange traffic for free. Consumers and most companies buy bandwidth from one company. Small ISPs buy access and resell it. Medium sized ISPs peer with some and pay for the transit to reach the rest of the Internet. The biggest ones, the so-called tier one, peer or sell to everybody.

I wonder if we should treat the ownership of copyright like other property and make people pay for it. Big companies want to treat intellectual property like real estate. Property taxes probably wouldn't work since copyright is hard to value. Instead, fixed regular registration fees would work.

When somebody goes to register a copyright, they would need to pay a small fee. Every ten years, they would need to renew the copyright and pay the fee. This guarantees that somebody is interested in the copyright and thinks it has value. The fee would be small, say $10 to $100. I would also think that transferring the copyright upon inheiritance requires paying the free or at least changing the registration.

The Copyright Office would have an up-to-date database of all the registered copyrights. This would make it possible to find the copyright holders. This scheme has the downside that to find out of work is still copyrighted a database would need to be checked but at least there would be a central database.

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