[AnimalMuppet]

I don't buy either the premise or the conclusion of your last paragraph. If I own a sewing machine that I use to do piece work, that doesn't make my sewing machine rent-seeking. It makes it a tool that I use to do work.

But yes, expand this to IP. Tax Microsoft and Disney for the full value of their copyrights. If they don't want to pay the tax, they can let the copyright lapse early. Tax google for the full value of google.com. And so on.

[jampekka]

In the typical socialist divide of different kinds of property a sewing machine that you use yourself would not be considered privately owned capital (private property). In general "private property" are things that yield profits without the owner doing the work. If you rented out the sewing machine to somebody else to work for, the things get a bit blurrier. If you own a sweatshop with 100 sewing machines, it's clearly "private property".

The socialist terminology around the different forms of property is really bad and causes a lot of confusion.