[nsgi]

How would you value the product of a startup, or some open source software that doesn't make any money but the creator wants to use a copyleft license for? Also, how would this work internationally? Would you have to pay a proportion of the value to the US government even if the US is a small market for you?

[izacus]

What kind of "startup product" is 15 or 20 years old and has been unchanged since then?

That would be older than Google for example.

[bhelkey]

> That would be older than Google for example.

Google was incorporated in 1998 [1]. To be fair, the patent for PageRank has since expired [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150623193037/https://www.googl... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999

[tlbsofware]

My guess would be that after the initial period of no taxes if the company wasn’t able to turn a profit on the patent then they would have to either sell the patent to avoid taxes or list it as a value that they would manage to be able to pay taxes and start raising money, might help with patent/copyright squatting