The premise of TFA is seriously flawed. First, his "oral rehydration therapy" technique is a terrible example, as clearly he's talking about patents not copyrights. You can't copyright a process, formula or method --- because the copyright protects the expression of the idea, not the idea itself.

Second, if anything, ongoing fees would seriously harm the smaller guy and not the large corporations, who have complex bring-forward and diarizing systems and could easily pay whatever fees.

Third, the registration of copyright, patents and trade-marks (and other forms of intellectual property) does have fees, and often annual or periodic fees for maintenance. Granted, they're trivial and not based on value or anything.

Fourth, the more prohibitive you make intellectual property systems, the more likely you are to encourage hoarding of knowledge and creativity. The whole purpose of intellectual property regimes such as patents is to balance the public good of having information available and the private good of commercializing or profiting from one's own hard work. If the patent system were truly prohibitive in the nature of fees, expiry deadlines, etc., the author's own "oral rehydration technique" example would be a prime example of what could possibly go wrong --- inventors would be more likely to hoard this information and then the public would not benefit (of course, in this specific case, altruism might trump).

Last, there are taxes on intellectual property, such as capital gains or royalty taxes (depending on jurisdiction). Typically they only arise when you actually sell or license it to another party, but they do arise.