In general, not interfering is the default position, there needs to be a reason it should enjoy protection.

Need to look at the goals the legislators were pursuing when they wrote the law. If protecting typefaces hinders the production of new books, that goes against the intent of the law. It might not make a difference on that front NOW, but back when typesetting was done by hand, and you needed a whole set of physical type for each typeface, it was a bigger deal.

The point of copyright is to encourage creativity, and there are reasons you might not care about encouraging creativity in typefaces. It’s a bit like trying to copyright how you pronounce a word, getting TOO creative here makes it more difficult to convey meaning, and people will do it anyway without the protection of copyright, it’s just a natural consequence of how language develops.

Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the US, but by some stupid interpretation, fonts are software, which is protected. Really annoying how tech-illiterate judges can screw up something this obvious. Even if the technical implementation of a font was something that should be protected IP, it should be under patent law, not copyright.

But then you’re buying the phone from google, which is not great if you’re trying to boycott google.

None of my devices have one that’s lacking a physical switch to disable it.

Maybe the value of real estate held by corporations is assigned proportionally to the shareholders? Maybe the tax rate is determined by whichever intermediate owner results in the highest rate.

I don’t see why you can’t make it enforceable and effective with less complexity than the current tax system.

Money represents things you do deserve, like the value created by your own work, as well as things you have no moral claim to, like natural resources. What makes sense to me is that the land is owned collectively. The property taxes are effectively rent to the rest of the population, and those that consider it most valuable should get to use it. I also think there should be separate taxes for things that devalue the land, like extracting minerals. You can still make a profit from extracting minerals based on the value added by your own work, but you need to pay the rest of humanity for their share of the minerals themselves.

Have to consider both the ideal and the existing situation for the best next step. Housing is a combination of value both created by human effort, and an accumulation of natural resources. I think what I’ve proposed is a big step towards fair allocation of housing, but critically, also something that could actually be implemented.

Why? You can force them to sell you a property and pay less on the mortgage than they pay on the same property on taxes.

The fault in your assumption is 1. that this would discourage corporations from buying up;

Did you plug in some numbers to see how much you pay when you own multiple homes? Rental units are not profitable when people can buy a house for cheaper than your property taxes on the same property. And normal people can do hostile buyouts from corporate landords too.

Land is a natural resource, and like air or sunlight, nobody deserves to own it more than anybody else.

“But my family has live here for generations!” sounds awful similar to “I deserve it because my great great grandfather killed the people that used to live here.”

You get to decide how much the land is worth to you. If you value it honestly and somebody else values it higher, a trade benefits both of you.

So rent is several times more expensive than a mortgage on the same property. Now what?

What does someone deserve to own? The value created by your own work yes, but nobody deserves to own natural resources like land more than anybody else. The whole point is that you get to decide how much the property is worth to you. If it’s worth more to someone else, you’re both better off for the trade. The only losers here are people trying to cheat on their taxes by giving a “low” appraisal, and people trying to hoard multiple properties.

Plug some numbers into that formula. If you own a $100k property, you pay 1k in taxes/year If you own 10 of those properties, you pay 100k/year. This would mean you have to charge more in rent than a mortgage would cost to buy the same property. The business model would become unprofitable.

Think about what the investment company’s tax rate would look like. They’d be bankrupt instantly. They’d have to pay 10M/year in taxes to maintain ownership of $10M in property.

Eh, probably paid like 25k for a house that’s worth 500k now or something. Really what we need to do is make property taxes scale more aggressively, so it isn’t economical to hoard more resources than you can actually use. Maybe something like annual tax owed = (value of all real estate owned by one person)^2/10,000,000. Perhaps with a grace period for new construction/renovations.

As for appraisal, let people declare what their property is worth, and force them to sell if someone offers 20% more than their claimed value.

What they need to do is throw some spaghetti at the wall, see what’s fun, then throw their hundreds of millions of dollars behind THAT.