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Comment by halgir | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...

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There's also Converse that adds a piece of cloth to the soles of their sneakers to be able to classify them as slippers for "taxation purposes".

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-is-why-your-c...

Snuggies are "used" and not "worn" in their promotional materials, because it's better to be taxed as a blanket than a garment.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/02/snuggies-ar...

Wonder if you could either sue them for delivering an insufficient product (it does not function as a slipper under the definition for longer than a day after walking) or keep returning them under warranty.

Hoo boy we have some classics in that category in the UK.

My personal fave is when morning TV host Lorraine Kelly successfully argued she wasn’t hosting as herself but acting a character called Lorraine Kelly, with very favourable tax consequences.

I think Steven Colbert hosted a show using himself as the host. I’m not sure about the tax implications though.

I'm pretty sure that was Chuck Noblet pretending to be Steven Colbert.

If there were any tax implications, they were incidental. The show was parody, so the opinions he espoused in character were necessarily ones he didn't actually hold.

And then when he tried using the "Steven Colbert" character on a different show, Comedy Central threatened him because Steven Colbert does not have rights to the "Steven Colbert" character.

That doesn’t seem like that should be possible. He sold his identity for life? Hollywood really does ask for your soul huh.

It would make sense why he’s never even jokingly gone back into that character on his new show.

It's not his identity, though. It's a character that he plays.

Yep- if Pee-wee Herman’s character were instead named after the actor, Paul Reubens, that character could still be licensed/sold. Paul Ruebens could still do interviews, and take jobs under that name, without permission, but he’d better not show up in the Pee-wee outfit.

And others can take your identity. If you happen to have the name Michael Jordan try putting out your own running shoes under your name.

Al Shugart started Shugart Associates and pretty much created the 5 1/4" floppy market. He sold to Xerox. He later started Shugart Technology and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit because he literally had sold his rights to his own name (in the particular context). He changed the name to Seagate Technology and the rest is history.

Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.

> Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.

This is not that case.

In popular media when "The Colbert Report" was broadcast, Steven Colbert was very open about the fact that he was playing a character on TV who happened to have the same name as him.

In the case of "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert," he is not playing the character from the Colbert Report.

The very specific bit was from after the 2017 election when Trump was elected. Steven Colbert did a bit, in character as "Steven Colbert", with props from "The Colbert Report", and a guest appearance from Jon Stewart. (Because the main focus of "The Colbert Report" was to mock conservatives.) Otherwise, everything Steven Colbert (the person) does on "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert" does not involve the "Steven Colbert" character from "The Colbert Report."

Prior to the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert was a character on the Daily Show, also a CC property.

Craig Kilborn was able to leave the Daily Show and take bits like 5 questions with him. However, CC was a much smaller network at the time.

To be fair, in Steven Colbert's case, he definitely was playing a character on The Colbert Report. A ridiculously conservative one that asked guests repeatedly if George W. Bush was a great president, or the greatest president. It was very over the top.

And that's when he stopped being funny. As a big fan I was confused by how unfunny his tonight show content was from day one compared to everything we saw upto that point. I can see why legal action when nowhere it's not the same product. Using the same name does cause confusion in the marketplace.

Alex Jones argued this, with the obvious implication, that whoever buys Infowars also owns the character of Alex Jones, and Alex Jones cannot play Alex Jones any more without infringing their copyright. (But I suspect this incoming government doesn't care to apply logical consistency to his case)

Perhaps IP law has jumped the shark.

This is akin to Fox News arguing in court that it is, in fact, entertainment and not news, despite it's name.

It's true though. All cable news is "entertainment news", not "news".

Nobody should have been getting their "news" from Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, or Rachel Maddow.

IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.

Thank you for pointing this out. Carlson and Maddow made nearly identical arguments in court and if both are not mentioned in the same breath, the speakers bias is instantly displayed to anyone who is educated on this topic.

> IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.

Agreed but the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News. The problem goes deeper. I despair.

Carlson's texts were wild, they proved that he knew he was spreading lies and did it anyway for views. That's why Fox settled with Dominion for $787 million dollars.

Meanwhile, OAN sued Maddow for calling them Russian propaganda and her lawyers responded by flexing, doubling down with receipts under oath. Signing up for consequences if they were wrong, and receiving none because they were correct.

So no, these are not the same, and anyone who argues that they are immediately reveals themselves to be partisan hacks.

They are not the same because one had text indicating they were aware? While the other claimed to be braindead and no texts to prove otherwise?

They are literally the same with one case having a text message.

They are both not news and if you think that one and not the other is news than you might be the partisan you are trying to label others as.

You may be interested in Young v. CNN going on right now. It probably won’t be a 9 figure judgment, but could be 8.

From https://www.courthousenews.com/ninth-circuit-backs-dismissal...

[Judge Smith] found OAN and its parent company were unlikely to prevail on the defamation claim because the challenged speech was not a statement of fact and the context of Maddow’s show made it likely her audience would expect her to make political opinions.

Putting the details of the court case aside, the judge is clearly saying that he does not believe that Maddow's show was "news" and it shouldn't be treated as such. That's what GP was pointing out: the defense of being "not news", which both shows have in common.

Nope. You paid very selective attention to that article:

> the context provided by Maddow’s commentary before and after she made the statement disclosed all relevant facts and contained colorful language.

If you listen to the clip in question, you'll observe that Maddow explains the facts, makes an exclamation, and then explains the facts. The complaint here only works if you clip chimp the exclamation. Contrast this with the complaint against Carlson, where he engages in what was by his own admission sustained deception.

> the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News

I think the 'average' person thinks of 'Entertainment News' as celebrity gossip, e.g., E! News[0] etc. Telling them the entertainment news/opinion/commentary they watch is not actually 'News' but is entertainment "news" doesn't compute

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E!_News

News Entertainment?

Like WWE is Sports Entertainment.

Absolutely- even as a lifelong leftie, I find the rhetoric on CNBC just as sickening as that on Fox.

I've (somewhat sardonically) wondered if they're both false flag operations. Imagine CNBC started with the idea "we'll parody the left to make them seem radical and unreasonable" but accidentally developed a huge following who didn't get the joke.

Do you mean MSNBC?

What Fox News argued was a bit more nuanced than that all of Fox News isn't news. Rather, "Fox successfully argued that one particular segment on Tucker Carlson’s show could only be reasonably interpreted as making political arguments, not making factual assertions, and therefore couldn’t be defamation."[1]

That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.

[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-fox-entertainment-...

I know nothing about the case but isn't that a little like saying "look, we weren't lying, cause we never said we were saying the truth"?

Well, context matters in looking at defamation claims.

Let's say you were involved in a freak hunting accident and shot somebody, but you were never charged with any crimes.

If the Fox News "hard news" program (if such a thing exists) said "skrebbel is a murderer" that is more likely to be understood to be a statement of fact, asserting something in a legalistic sense. [IANAL, but I think even this is unlikely to be defamation, although there is a somewhat similar case where ABC settled with Donald Trump over saying he was "liable for rape"]

If somebody on Tucker Carlson Tonight said "You can't trust anything that skrebbel guy says, he's a murderer!" that is more likely to be understood as an opinion based on disclosed facts, not a fact. That person isn't asserting that you committed or were convicted of a specific crime of murder, but rather that you killed somebody and it might be your fault. On a show were people are arguing and exchanging opinionated views, viewers should understand that these things are opinions. And therefore that's not defamation, because it's an opinion.

> You can't trust anything that skrebbel guy says, he's a murderer!

I am deeply offended and contemplating to sue you for defamation.

Political argument, as such, is worthwhile insofar as it can cause me to reexamine my own preconceptions. Facts I can pick up almost anytime.

Isn't it also how, many years ago, Top Gear got away with a hit job on Tesla by claiming they're just an entertainment show, so they're not obligated to do honest or truthful reviews?

I'm not from the UK, but wasn't there also a cake Vs biscuits thing for tax reasons?

Yes, Jaffa Cakes - minature sponge cakes flavoured with Jaffa oranges. Cakes aren't subject to Value Added Tax in the UK, which allows them to be sold more cheaply to the consumer or have a greater profit margin. A tribunal confirmed that they are true, real and genuine cakes, so you may feel entitled to enjoy your tax-free treat!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandco...

There is a musical I saw at the fringe about this.

I love strange musicals! Link in case anyone else is curious: https://playbill.com/article/is-it-a-cake-or-a-biscuit-a-jaf...

It's wild to me that anything you can buy in a store, especially something frivolous like cake, might be tax free.

In a way it's not completely tax-free; the embodied costs of producing and selling the cake are still taxed with employee income tax, National Insurance, import duties and so on.

The UK's exemption from VAT covers lots of things, but not an entirely logical selection: cakes are considered staples and are exempt, but drinks (including soft drinks, beer and mineral water) are taxed at the full 20% rate.

In general, I would personally prefer that the UK not have VAT, as it's a regressive tax (people with lower incomes pay a greater percentage of their income on it than high earners do).

I think basic and healthy foods should be VAT exempt. Bread, milk, eggs, vegetables, fruit (maybe not fruit that needs to be shipped from South America or Africa), water etc. Also maybe school books and newspapers and of course medicine. Sugary drinks _should_ be taxed.

Sales tax is horrendously regressive and during a war you will find that things like cakes and biscuits are not actually frivolous at all. We drink a lot of tea.

And windows being covered with bricks for tax reasons.

The window tax features prominently in a visual novel video game (The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles), which also contains a bunch of wildly outlandish historical nonsense and characters like mad-scientist inventors, teleportation devices, and Sherlock Holmes types. I was blown away to learn the window tax was actually a real thing, not something silly just made up for the game.

Taxes were also part of the reason newspapers got so large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadsheet#History

Fascinating!

And also the reason that houses in Amsterdam are so narrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_the_Netherlands#Arc...

Daylight Robbery [1]

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43805741-daylight-robber...

Subway fell on the wrong side of similar tax laws in Ireland - their sugar content in their bread was too high, so for tax purposes, their subs are legally cakes: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/919189045/for-subway-a-ruling...

There was also the famous decision in the Jaffa Cake case where the VAT treatment depended on whether or not a Jaffa cake was a cake or a biscuit https://standrewseconomist.com/2023/12/31/let-them-eat-cake-...

The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.

I remember hearing about this because the one who wanted it classified as a biscuit proposed the test that determined it was a cake. That is the sole reason I remember this story.

There’s another one about Walkers taste sensations poppadom snacks. Question was, is it a crisp or not? Can’t remember the outcome

The specifics were about whether it required any additional preparation like a traditional poppadom vs being a ready to eat snack like a crisp.

Walkers lost the case.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/19/walkers-min...

Which was a silly case to bring forward because they are clearly a cake. It's literally a sponge cake bottom.

I had a friend that argued that Marshall Mathers (Eminem) could never actually be sued for defamation because most of the defamatory things "he" said wasn't actually him saying it, but Slim Shady.

Hah.

Sounds insane. But what is more surprising to me - is why dolls were taxed differently than other toys. At first glance, it looks like stupid rules force to play silly games.

This. It’s a pretty reasonable answer to a stupid question. Dolls depict people.

Some trade war from the XIX century or something? Or maybe because dolls were historically thought for girls?

Possibly, bisque and china dolls were often imported from Germany.

Probably lobbying from a local doll maker

In India, the pizza base has a different tax rate than the topping and so some restaurants will have two separate lines on your pizza bill - one for the base at 5% tax and another for the topping at 18% tax.

The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."

Luxury vs premium vs ‘esssential’ at work eh?

All those make sense and are pretty common: bread is taxed lower than most pizza toppings.

Raw ingredients are taxed less than ready-to-eat or sugar-coated ultra-processed good. And I'm totally ok with that.

But a pizza as a whole is a ready-to-eat good. And a pizza isn’t a pizza without the crust.

What I think is happening is that the place is specifically charging different tax rates for each part of the pizza. That does seem odd but the alternative would be to tax the whole of the pizza at a higher tax rate than the one presented. Example, most countries might put a whole pizza at, say, 10% VAT, while here part of it is at, say, 4% and the rest at 10%. Ideally that's cheaper.

The pizza thing seemed incredibly silly to me. Surely the restaurant has already paid the tax when they bought the raw ingredients? Must any product served in a restaurant be taxed according to the rate of the most highly taxed ingredient in it, regardless of proportion?

So I looked it up. And yes, that is exactly the case, and it's an absurd situation that is causing massive headaches.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-63281037

did you get a second glance? did you figure out why they are taxed differently?

Sadly no..., I browsed quickly and found this post https://slate.com/business/2011/12/are-mutants-human.html which leads to a dead link to the podcast. Did not listen to the podcast (yet).

I also expected somebody from this community to enlight me :)

Or my shirt that has a tiny, useless pocket on the inside of my shirt (down where it might often be tucked inside of your waistband.) It has a tag with a picture of sunglasses on it, and a reasonably sized pair of sunglasses might just tenuously perch inside.

This makes it a jacket, and jackets are taxed at a lower rate than shirts.

The same shenanigans more or less work for most types of taxation. There’s always an angle to reduce or even eliminate taxes, unless you work on salary or for wages. It’s clear who the system is built for lol.

Why would jackets even be taxed differently than shirts. It's so silly.

Freezing to death is worse than looking nice?

5% of a $100 jacket is $5

15% of a $33 shirt is $5

5% of a $33 jacket is $1.65

...it's definitely gamesmanship but if you squint you can see where it comes from.

This reminds me of maybe the worst tax in human history which is also unconstitutional. The Pauschalabgabe[0] in Germany, which also got adopted in other countries, implements a freely decidable flatrate tax on all mediums which can be used to create a pirated copy.

How much tax for a laser printer? Well it depends how fast it prints:

Up to 14 pages/Minute: 25,00 € Up to 39 pages/Minute: 50,00 € From 40 pages/Minute: 87,50 €

For every storage medium this tax has been paid, because of the possibility of making a pirated copy. Technically we all paid already to make pirates copies.

0. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe

Isn't this also what allows people to create copies for personal use, and what makes downloading pirated media legally clear, and only producing/distributing illegal? Sounds like a fine tradeoff, as fixing IP laws (and international treaties) is way too hard of a problem.

It’s the other way around the law got created because of the possibility of private copies and their fear of profit loss. A private copy is only legal if the source is legal. Circumventing copy protection makes it illegal. Pirated copies and temporary copies like streaming are afaik grey areas because the difficulty to prove and not a trade off.

It’s a silly world where people who never worked send people who only worked as mobsters to take money from people who work for a living. Then the first two groups share that money in 999999:1 proportion. They call it “taxation”.

It has upsides like having an army for defense, roads and other common things. But don’t forget the primary nature and motivation behind it. They just want your money, and your offspring to please them in various ways.

You ought to see the magic they do when coding medical procedures for billing in the US. It makes these tax shenanigans look simple.

I don't think I've ever seen that on any of my shirts here in the US. Is this in the US?

I believe it was sold into the US market originally. I bought it second hand in a secondary market that sources its used articles primarily from the USA and Canada.

How odd I don't know that I've ever seen one in such a weird position.

It would actually be way to miss. If it hadn’t been marked with a sunglasses emblem, I would have easily thought it was just a gusset. It’s just one of the bottom front corners of the left side of the shirt, with a triangular gusset that is big enough to just hold 2/3 of a pair of glasses, mesh, in this particular case.

This sort of thing happens relatively often; Sony also tried (unsuccessfully) to have the PS2 deemed a personal computer (which would have lead to 0 tariffs in the EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2

IIRC the PS3 Linux option existed because of this same tariff.

I often wonder what the ROI is on this. How much did Sony have to pay engineers to implement this interesting but seemingly pretty useless functionality vs. what it actually saved them in the aforementioned tariffs? I know the knee jerk reaction is to say it obviously saved them some money or they wouldn't have done it, but I've seen far too much corporate stupidity in my life to take that as a given. I'd love to see the data.

Maybe it was just a passion project for the engineers or even Ken Kutaragi ? See also Net Yarose, Linux For Playstation 2, Other OS & Yellow Dog Linux for Playstation 3.

For sure, they had very interesting architectures. Used even in supercomputers as a number of them in parallel

Well, in the end it didn't save them anything, because the EC didn't accept that having a toy basic interpreter made what was obviously a games console a PC. I can't imagine it was terribly expensive in the scheme of things, though.

If it can run a desktop linux environment it's a PC. That said it probably should only count if the preinstalled software is Linux and not some games OS.

I would say that a PC should be compatible with the software and hardware of the IBM 5150.

Apple mac not a personal computer ?

When you ship millions of units of the kit, you only need a small savings per unit for the sum total to become a big enough saving to be noticeable to the financial dept. bean counters.

Or when the makers of Jaffa Cakes baked a giant 12 inch version[1] and brought it to the court to argue they were cakes and not biscuits to get lower VAT.

[1]: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/time-compan...

I would eat that.

I wish supermarkets would put them on the cake aisle instead and keep the biscuit aisle pure.

That's a mass protest I could get behind

Most UK bikkies are meh, though. I have to import ones from NZ here to survive.

Mallowpuffs are so much better than tea cakes. Squiggles, Tim tams, chit chats, sultana pasties, griffins macaroons, toffee pops, hundreds and thousands, mint slice.

Whereas here it's mostly shortbread or bourbons/custard creams.

Which is fucking hilarious when you think that a lot of xmen storyline is about them wanting to be perceived as humans

Which legally probably also makes it a fairy tale

"It's a nice story and the court won't prevent you from telling it, but legally these beings in that story are clearly NOT humans"

Hilarious.

And also, they are an "on your face" depiction of the dehumanization of the Holocaust victims...

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! I can't have POLITICS in my comics, my comics are apolitical, there's good guys and bad guys, and it's always clear who the bad guys are - those that are not [like] me! /s

And Professor X is Martin Luthor King and Magneto is Malcolm X.

Pretty much fits. It probably wouldn't be such an issue if they were just human.

Sounds like Ford putting seats in the back of their vans so they could pay less tax when importing them from Mexico, then removing them before they're sold. Looks like they've now been fined, but they got away with it for a while.

Technically the ones they got in hot water for were from EU to get around the Chicken Tax.

This was also the reason for the (in)famous BRAT seats:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_BRAT

A bunch of fun articles around these areas in the UK (free to read, think you might need an account though - apologies). Two food and one toy:

https://www.ft.com/content/5af5b182-349a-4a25-b4fb-4551908f2...

https://www.ft.com/content/a6a54008-6059-4052-99ae-282f148f2...

https://www.ft.com/content/a8d6413e-1184-4f89-9bcb-4f6cb8d7a...

FT Alphaville is such an excellent column

I wonder if there is any place where one can look up all these sort of creative legal-tax shenanigan stories. They are so fun and such an interesting lens to see what _is_ via this interlinked, case-specific web of events.

The book is called Daylight Robbery: How Tax Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43805741-daylight-robber...

When Trump set a tariff on German optics because he was mad at Germany, Leica had a workaround as well.

Most of their equipment is made in Portugal and finished in Germany, with whatever WTO agreed % of value added that allows them to stamp "Made In Germany" on the goods.

So for US markets they issues a series of lenses that were more fully finished in the Portuguese factory such that they could be stamped "Made In Portugal".

The tax system is over complicated! Why the distinction between toys and dolls?

Regulatory capture most likely

The Doll Industrial Complex

Thanks, amazing story! I found this nice coverage of the events: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/92007/why-us-federal-cou...

In universe, arguing the X-Men are not human would put you firmly in the villain category.

exactly, that was core to the whole plot; oppressed mutants fighting to have their basic human rights recognized.

So it turns out that the final boss denying mutants their humanity are... the tax authorities.

Capitalists? in the villain category? Impossible!

This has interesting implications for the Marvel canon, as the conflict between average humans and mutants is a primary plot driver for x-men

> Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human

Isn't that true though?

Was their lawyer William Stryker?

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