Comment by tzs
2 years ago
Such a system has been proposed for copyrighted works in general. The general idea is that you change copyright law so that making copies does not require permission of the copyright holder, but you also put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with copying. The government would then distribute that tax money to copyright owners in some manner dependent on how much their work was copied.
Even Stallman has suggested such a system [1], with the amount a given copyright owner gets for a work being proportional to the cube root of how much it is copied.
A common suggestion for the tax is a tax on internet access.
For entertainment such as movies and music and games that could probably work well. Probably also for closed source software. For open source software it might be too difficult to figure out how to allocate the money.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...
Yes I think it needs to be centralized and aggregated.
I am sure many companies realize that they gain value from open source. Thus they are willing to pay something. However they do not want to handle transactions with every transitive dependency they use. Just like a radio station doesnt want a contract with every artist. This is why isolated commersial licenses wouldnt work for anything but the very largest projecys.