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Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

Frankly I'm of the increasing opinion that if you do a tax write off on a creative work that you should be required to put it into the public domain. You've already made it clear that you believe that the value you would gain from it is $0, ergo it doesn't make sense to let companies vault content forever once written off.

For example, a bunch of TV series were written off last year, which means that content has been taken down both from streaming and purchasing. It is effectively completely inaccessible outside of piracy.

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Yes. And remember, while this may sound unfair ("why should I be forced to give away X by the gubbermint?!"), the company is also free to not take the tax write-off at all and just shove the whole thing into a wood chipper. If they want society to subsidise their successes, they shouldn't get to hoard the rest. And that's before we get into all the tax breaks, copyright shenanigans and chicanery that also subsidises the industry with taxpayer resources.

You clearly don't understand tax write offs. How would they "not take the tax write off"?? The tax write off is the expenses they made while creating the film. There is no way for them not to write it off, after the expenses have been made.

If they earn $100 and then spend $100, they have to write it off, because they no longer have the money, so they can't pay taxes on it.

If they want to use the expense they made on the (apparently) failed film to reduce their tax burden, they can trade that multimillion reduction in their tax for the (according to them) worthless materials they did end up with.

If those materials have worth, then they shouldn't be writing them off in the first place while also sitting on them. If they don't have worth, it shouldn't be a problem. Except in some zero-sum type thing where they'd rather destroy it then let anyone else benefit, and then there's a question of if society at large should be footing the bill for the destruction of value in order to stymie competitors.

Now, clearly, that's not how the rules actually currently work or we wouldn't be in here at all.

You're wrong. Not all costs incurred in the current year reduce taxes in the current year.

These weren't expenses (which reduce net income in the period when incurred) but investments in a new movie (which create assets which sit on the balance sheet).

The decision to write off the asset in the current year (rather than amortizing it over time) is the result of a business decision.

No, the tax write-off in this situation is the company saying that they will never release or profit off something ever again. This allows them to artificially reduce the value of their asset to 0.

Releasing the movie could have negative value (cannibalism), so they'd need an additional tax write-off to cover their donation And you really don't want that, because it would be abused to hell and back like Microsoft and other software companies do when they report their "first hit is free" marketing samples as charitable donations to schools.

I understand where you're coming from, but it's just not tenable.

First of all, a lot of these creative works are ultimately unfinished. Are you really supposed to release the superhero movie without half the CGI, with some of the scenes in front of green screens? Without a soundtrack? What's the point?

And secondly, even when they are finished, what about when they're just bad? If something simply doesn't work creatively, despite everyone's best efforts, why force them to expose their failure to the world? There are well-known cases where directors and screenwriters have demanded that their names be taken off a finished movie because they don't want to be associated with the final product, because they think it's just bad.

The idea that bad work is forced to be released, if you want to count the effort on them as business expenses, seems like it would be a net negative for artists. Isn't part of artistic control deciding what you do and don't want the world to see?

I don't really care about bad work being released; there are plenty of awful works that were released to the public domain.

In this scenario, companies are permanently shelving work that has value. Infinity Train for example was made a tax write-off, which means the creator can never continue it and people can never watch it. The negatives of some bad work being released is not outweighed by the amount of good work that has been destroyed by the current system.

If you want to argue about artistic control, then you need to come up with a solution to the above. The status quo is unacceptable, so let's see what you got.

> The status quo is unacceptable, so let's see what you got.

Please don't be snarky or have attitude like that.

Anyways, if you'd like to know, the specific Infinity Train example (as well as Westworld etc.) have to do with a very specific write-off opportunity that occurs in a limited time frame when a corporate merger occurs -- in this case, HBO with Discovery. I'm not familiar with the specifics, but if you want to fix something, I'd suggest looking at this particular merger tax write-off loophole (?).

It would seem to be a result/problem of that very specific accounting move in merger situations only. It's not a problem with write-offs in general.

I proposed a solution and your best argument was 'what if it was bad'. Your argument had no substance to it. You're arguing about artistic control when the artists are literally not the one in control, it's the businesses making a decision to take away art from them.

And the Infinity Train example has nothing to do with a specific loophole, it is how tax write-offs work. It was done because the merger saddled Warner Bros with debt which it sought to rectify by reducing its tax burden as much as possible through devaluation of assets. The only 'loophole' is that companies have to pay taxes on assets gained during a merger. So to avoid this companies write off their assets to say their value is $0, reducing their total tax burden. But the core problem is still the fact that they can say that their asset is worth $0 and shelve it forever.

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