I think we should consider funding information goods (software, movies, 
music, etc.) through tax revenue rather than copyrights. (Those rights are 
increasingly difficult to enforce and produce much waste by causing 
information goods to be priced far above marginal costs.) One way to do it 
would be to let people spend their own money to produce the information, 
and then reimburse them based on some function of the expended cost and 
the social benefit. That brings up the question of how to evaulate the 
social benefit of an information good. To quote a paper by Carl Shapiro 
and Hal R. Varian:

If the government could raise tax revenues without distorting economic 
activity (e.g., by discouraging work and employment through payroll and 
income taxes), it might make some sense to increase taxes to finance the 
creation of information, which could then be distributed freely. However, 
as noted above, government taxes inevitably cause their own 
inefficiencies. Also, with free dissemination of information, there is no 
independent test of the value of that information, making it more 
difficult to determine which types of information are worthy of government 
funding. 
(end quote)

Are there any existing proposals for measuring the value of information, 
which is being freely disseminated? If not, I'd like to proposed the 
following scheme:

Whenever someone first accesses a piece of information, he may be chosen 
by the access mechanism randomly, with probability p1, to answer whether 
he values that information more than some random amount of money $x. Then 
with probability p2, if he answers yes, he is charged $x, otherwise he is 
denied access to this piece of information forever. p1 and p2 are both 
supposed to be small. In the usual case, he would just be allowed to 
access the information for free.

Users in this system would be able to access almost all information for 
free, and when they are asked to state their preferences they have 
incentives to answer truthfully. By measuring how many people use each 
piece of information, and combining that with the answers users provide, a 
statistical estimate of its aggregate value can be easily computed.

Some copy protection would still be needed, so that if someone is denied 
access, he is not able to obtain the information from another channel. 
However, the idea is that unlike today, the market for such "piracy" would 
be so small that no one would have an incentive to supply pirated 
information or the tools needed to break copy protection.

Is this a viable and/or preferable alternative to our copyright based 
information economy?