I heard of this before; the chain restaurant doesn't want to take the hit when rounding down, so they just add the fractions to the next bill and hope nobody notices or cares. The US method of listing raw price then adding sales tax after (do they do this in fast food places?) means that this is difficult for customers to detect..

Or teenage girls singing Mettalica -> Nothing Else Matters.

The reasoning the police give for having privacy is a lot more realistic: to deny criminals the ability to track police actions.

Except, that reasoning may seem sound, but the people they want to block are not criminals until they have been charged and convicted by a court of law. What they actually want: to deny all people the ability to track police actions.

Its up to you if you accept that this is proper, but history shows that some amount of oversight is desireable, even necessary.

I don't see the difficulty. If the copyright owner wants copyright protection in a given jurisdiction, it's up to them to submit the tax. If they don't, after some small number of years the IP goes into the public domain.

The complexity here is first that there must be a government organisation for each jurisdiction set up and maintained which keeps track of IP registration (vs "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights). Further complexity is that as a potential distributor of a potentially out of copyright work, I must contact this government organisation to check the status of every work (vs "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights), and how often should I contact them regarding a certain work that needs tax paid regularly? (of course, "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights) They could of course just make the data available for free on the internet, but see below..

Government organisations cost money to setup and maintain and yes, you could make them self-funding but then they start to become motivated differently. Why would they let you look something up for nothing? They could be forced to, but then you are talking about another law for that.. why do you want so many laws on the books? Its complicated when that happens..

Shortening copyright to 10 years won't change anything about the economics of pirating.

I think it would. With a short copyright term, there would be vast amounts of IP that is still culturally relevant available to distribute. There would be money to be made distributing that legally, and the organisations that would be making money distributing that would not be interested in illegally distributing protected IP.

Yes, piracy would still be possible and would still exist, much as counterfeit goods are available today.. but really, is it a problem when the real thing is available legally and cheaply? The vast majority of consumers are not going to bother seeking out the illegal suppliers, which really marginalizes them.

Another option is an IP tax.

Problem for me with your suggestion is that this is complex to administer and requires work to find if IP is in public domain or not. A work may be under copyright or in the public domain in different jurisdictions and it will be very difficult to determine which. Why should I need to apply to a government department in order to find out if what I am going to do is lawful or not?

I wouldn't necessarily oppose an IP tax, but that is separate.. You don't pay property tax to keep your land from becoming part of the commons, you own the property and you pay tax based on the value of it because the government wants a cut. If you don't pay the tax, they might take it away from you and sell it to somebody else but it remains property and it is still valuable, it does not become free for all to use. If you want to try to implement an IP tax that is based on the value of the IP because you want a cut of the money then please, feel free to go ahead. The government has a massive department dedicated to collecting tax revenues already and they would no doubt be able to accomodate that just fine.

At the very least some sanity is needed in maximum copyright. Not more than a year beyond the lifetime of the creator, and no amount of rights transfers should change that. This could still be abused in a Mickey Mouse-like case, with constant spin-off products being created. Somebody smart finish this train of thought. I'm getting off at this station.

Problem for me with your suggestion, is that anything depending on "lifetime of creator" is vague and open to twisted interpretations. If I have a work that I wish to copy, it would be better to have all the information available in that work as to when its copyright is expired, not have to research if the person is dead or not (which is not always clear, especially if facts have been obscured). Also, it requires a separate law for "works for hire" where an corporate entity who cannot die owns the copyright. It is far better to have a single rule that applies to all copyright than it is to try and cover works depending on who owns the copyright. That way lies confusion and when it is unclear when anybody owns a copyright (cf. "Happy Birthday") then people can be harassed endlessly.

Perhaps if copyright length was judged by promotion and sales figures.

No, because that is vague and open to interpretation. For simplicity, copyright should be a fixed term. Then, when you buy something, and see it says right on the package that "This item is Copyright 2006" and you know that after X years you are free to copy it and distribute all you like. You can keep that original work as reference and if somebody comes to you with a lawsuit saying that you are copying their derivative work (with a later copyright) then you show it in court and the judge tells them to leave you alone.

Vague laws with loopholes are bad

(I favour 10 years, its a nice round number and most people can count that much on their fingers)

That's easily addressed, if the persons name you are tagging on a photo doesn't have a facebook account, you can't add that name. Simples.

Facebook have pretty effective facial recognition software, which, although the results are not enabled for general use, they presumably run photos through it anyway? If your face appears in one or more pictures or your name is mentioned, no matter if you are tagged or have an account, they can start to build a profile about you. Every time you are mentioned, or tagged, they can tie more disparate facts together..

If all this is distasteful for EU citizens, well Facebook is a US company and they can just export the data to the US and do whatever they like, right? Except now they are told that they cannot export data. Seems fair to me

It's been a long time since I had time to browse any of the code repositories out there, but last time I looked, the BSD people (Free, Net, Open, ...) all had their own BSD-licensed unixy command-line tools.

Speaking as a NetBSD user (and developer) we do have something that looks similar to busybox under /rescue, a statically linked binary which acts differently depending on how you call it. See the "list" file at cvsweb for common utilities included and the build seems easy enough to configure your own utilities as required. rescue(8)

FreeBSD at least has a simlar tool, not sure about OpenBSD..