Quoting+updating myself from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855835 .Go read the discussion if you find it interesting, the discussion touches on the feasibility, flaws, objections, etc.

Intellectual "Property Tax".

Have everyone declare the value of their intellectual "property" (patents, copyrights, trademarks, designs) - each and every item, for that year, on their tax return, and have them pay 1% of the value as "IP tax".

The declared amount is what one pays for a compulsory license (through an escrow - i.e., if I want to use it, I can just do that by putting money in an escrow account set up for that "property" item, and be immune from lawsuit) or if successfully sued, and up to 3 times that for willful infringement, _per year_ -- and no more. But of course, property owner can always negotiate a lower payment. This can apply equally to any kind of IP, including music (which already has a compulsory licensing arrangement), videos and patents (which do not).

All of a sudden, everyone has an incentive to state a reasonable value for their patent. Copyright catalogs that are not being published (old music recordings, old books, old movies) would be assigned 0 value by copyright holder, in order to avoid tax - which would mean anyone can freely make a copy. If they believe -- at the end of the year -- that someone is making a profit at their expense, they can set the value as high as they want at the end of that year, pay the tax, and sue the profiteer.

The important points are:

- People keep forgetting that patents are an offensive measure. The only right they give you is to sue others for infringement. They do not give you a "clear to operate" approval. If you can't afford to sue later ($200K-$500K to even consider a patent lawsuit in the US these days), the patent has negative value for you (because it does cost $10K-$50K to maintain over the life of the patent, but you won't be able to fend of infringement in court should it happen).

- It ties patent maintenance cost to patent value; the current system has essentially fixed (and relatively low for bigcorp/trollcorp) costs for potentially infinite value in the case of a successful lawsuit. e.g. -- you can only find legos from the lego company, and magsafe adapters from Apple, because they won't license it to anyone for a reasonable price, which is the same as an infinite price as far as others are concerned.

- There ARE nontrivial costs to maintaining the IP system -- courts, police, customs and border protection, etc. These are mostly paid for by the tax base, but enjoyed disproportionately by patent owners who declare huge values at no additional cost.

- Many people I've mentioned this idea to compare it to some (unspecified) ideal system, or to a no-patent-law-at-all situation, and obviously find problems. It is important to note that it is not worse for the individual investor (they already need huge resources to successfully sue), or the legitimate patent. It hurts patent trolls by introducing cost-of-carry for their "property". It also forces patent bullies to actually care about patents rather than collect as many as possible (If IBM assigns $1M value to each one of their 30,000 patents, that would cost $300M/year to maintain. They won't).

- It puts older and newer patents on equal footage. Any major reform that does not address existing patents becomes unreasonably complicated or is useless from the get go.

- If patents last 20 years, this amounts to 20% tax over the lifetime of the patent -- comparable to capital gains tax in most jurisdictions (which is what you would pay if you sold it on day one for that some). If the value drops to zero down the line, e.g. because of better technology - you've only paid in proportion to the value you believed you extracted from it.

- Finally, you could give tax credit for existing filing / maintenance fees - which would mean that under the current fee structure, every patent in the US would be considered worth ~$100K/year for the purpose of lawsuits.