[e12e]

Thank you for your patient and lenghty replies. I still think we disagree - but I think I'm getting a better grasp on your view/ideas.

How do you see taxation/fees working across borders? Clearly agreements can be made, but it seems much more feasible to piggyback on trade agreements than to erect a new international body of law just for digital content? How do money paid by a Chinese factory worker find its way to an American poet? And vice-versa?

[dredmorbius]

Addressing a different aspect, the Ashley Madison incident is another argument against micropayments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083536

[dredmorbius]

I get the sense I'm not selling you on this, but the conversation may end up getting FAQed ;-)

How do you see taxation/fees working across borders?

Good question, and one I hadn't really considered, but I'd divide it out into respective chunks:

1. Let's get back to the goal here: it's to provide sufficient compensation to authors and artists of works distributed in electronic form with a minimal of interference, overhead, control, cencorship, or privacy invasion, while enabling, facilitating, and encouraging open distribution of such works. It's not "build a perfect utility-capture system", and it's not "prevent the least amount of unauthorized / uncompensated use."

To that end, a first-order solution to foreign use is "it doesn't matter.

But let's say that's not quite satisfactory.

2. The total global GDP is presently about $70 trillion. Roughly half of that by nominal GDP is contained within the G7 nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US.[1] The G20 (20 largest economies) are 85%.[2] The OECD -- 34 nations -- ⅔ of global GDP.[3] Again, Zipf power functions are your friend. This puts the lion's share of interest in a subset of the 206 sovereign states of Earth.

As with other international tariff treaties (postal, telecoms), most are based on bidirectional rights. If your country's producing significant informational goods, you'll have higher incentives to strike a deal with other countries. States which produce little by way of intellectual property would of course have little incentive. Most of these would be developing nations.

Note as well: this scheme would be fully compatible with CC or Free Software/OpenSource licensing. Authors/creators could register and be eligible for compensation.

3. And as with broadcast, your interest is finding a representative population to sample*. The largest providers, servers, or ISPs within a given nation. If this is based on some sort of licensing arrangement, you'd be looking at those parties to set up monitoring and enforcement.

So: first approximation, don't worry about it and treat each nation independently.

Second: scale out among largest economies first.

Third: approach largest broadband / connectivity providers first.

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Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7_(major_advanced_economies)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oecd

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states