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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

A tax small enough to not harm indie publishers is almost tautologically unlikely to affect big publishers at all. The incentives created by fines and taxes are greatly overestimated. For something like this to work, it needs to be achievable without the continued cooperation or even existence of the original business

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To the opposite, the tax should kick in if the operation is large enough. If your revenue from the game exceeds $10M, you should do some minimal continuity work. If it exceeds $100M, you should do much more serious continuity work.

So you'd like to incentivise more obfuscation of revenue to boot?

I think an effective remedy for this kind of situation can't just be fiscal, we need requirements to publish adequate technical specifications and strong IP carveouts to make it likely to move the needle. Forcing companies to maintain continuous support is a non-starter. We should instead focus on enabling unofficial support from outside the companies, and remove legal threats from those who choose to do so

Obfuscation of revenue is a really bad idea, all the way to a federal criminal investigation.

The idea is that the continuity requirements should not be onerous, given the revenue, say, less than 1% of it, "a good problem to have".

Publishing a reasonable spec would be a part of that.

Pretty sure that hasn't stopped Hollywood accounting for the last century, and I see no reason why EA can't pull off the same things that Warner Brothers has been doing.

Hollywood accounting is about hiding profit by making it look like all of the revenue was used for expenses. Hiding all of your revenue outright is a different ballgame and if it were easy to do legally Nintendo wouldn't be paying billions in taxes on it already.

This is unrelated to the thread. The point was obfuscation of the fact that the profit is from a specific copyrighted work. I.e. selling 600 versions of a game each with a different default skin hides no income from tax authorities.

You're referencing profit instead of revenue, which the thread was referring to. Again, you can't hide revenue as easily. Splitting it up 600 ways doesn't solve the problem that game XYZ sold 10 million copies from the 600 subsidiary distributors. Nintendo could hide the profit that way, saying the subsidiaries took 100% of the revenue as costs, but the total revenue can't be hidden. It's either a reported sale or not, there's not really a way to fudge that.

Personally, I think we should consider making legal IP protection opt-in. In other words, with a product like this you should provide a way to remove the protection to the Library of Congress, for example. If you fail to provide this, then you cannot use the courts to enforce copyright/patent/etc.

Imagine if the tax was, for the sake of argument, based on the inflation-adjusted lifetime revenue over $500k and had different rates based on the total sales, each increasing over time so the cost of locking up a 20 year old game is more than they ever made for it. I don’t see how what wouldn’t have a strong incentive to release things they aren’t actively commercializing.

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