Through Slashdot I found this small opinion piece in LA Times which discussed the strange aspects of claiming that intellectual property have this enormous value when it comes to suing for infringement, but have no value when it comes to tax issues.
As intellectual property and copyrights become an even more significant part of our economy, and as copyright holders (not necessarily the creators) make claims of “stealing” as though it is real property, it should be taxed. Relative to copyrights’ significance in our economy, the amount of revenue from this source should be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
I don’t think this is the best solution in a world where technology changes some of the fundamental aspects of ownership of ideas and information, but it is definitely worth thinking about for cooling down this counter productive war against file sharing of music and film.