alt Hacker NewsIP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land.
It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
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closewith • yesterday at 2:16 PM
This is actually a solved problem. It is self-assessed valuation with compulsory sale at declared value, known as the Harberger Tax.
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Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of payments it will generate; take the net present value using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate.
Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.
I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.