I firmly believe that anything “written off” in that manner - this includes movies, too, in particular - should have to be released into the public domain as part of that process.
Any business that’s paying less taxes is harming the public good; we should at least benefit in some small way from that.
Well if it’s “written off” of their taxes that means it’s taxes they don’t pay which is essentially paid by the rest of us in taxes we do pay. So yeah it should be public domain since we “bought” it.
That’s not accurate. A tax write-off isn’t “taxes you don’t pay”. It’s “lost income that isn’t taxed”.
The US corporate income tax is nominally 21%. If a company writes off 100 of loss (or charitible donations, or expenses, or anything else), their earnings are reduced by 100 dollars, saving them 21 bucks. There’s no way to “profit” off of failure through write-offs.
It’s more likely they have contractual obligations with marketing companies, retailers, data centers, etc. If a product is discontinued they can get out of those obligations. Sure they will write off a loss and reduce the taxes they pay, but it’s not as if a bigger loss nets them more money somehow.
Really what needs to be regulated is all of the excessive exclusive B2B contracts which mean a company can’t just sell a product for a small amount of money to someone to maintain it when they’re done with that product.
I firmly believe that anything “written off” in that manner - this includes movies, too, in particular - should have to be released into the public domain as part of that process.
Any business that’s paying less taxes is harming the public good; we should at least benefit in some small way from that.
Well if it’s “written off” of their taxes that means it’s taxes they don’t pay which is essentially paid by the rest of us in taxes we do pay. So yeah it should be public domain since we “bought” it.
That’s not accurate. A tax write-off isn’t “taxes you don’t pay”. It’s “lost income that isn’t taxed”.
The US corporate income tax is nominally 21%. If a company writes off 100 of loss (or charitible donations, or expenses, or anything else), their earnings are reduced by 100 dollars, saving them 21 bucks. There’s no way to “profit” off of failure through write-offs.
It’s more likely they have contractual obligations with marketing companies, retailers, data centers, etc. If a product is discontinued they can get out of those obligations. Sure they will write off a loss and reduce the taxes they pay, but it’s not as if a bigger loss nets them more money somehow.
Really what needs to be regulated is all of the excessive exclusive B2B contracts which mean a company can’t just sell a product for a small amount of money to someone to maintain it when they’re done with that product.