Comment by mystraline | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mystraline | Hacker News Reader

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I never did.

Again, these companies who want to "sell" something, but still retain owner-level control at a distance should be classified as a rental.

And a rental means the company still owns this property, and therefore should pay taxes on all of their property.

And that would absolutely mean that game consoles SHOULD not be sold as such. Or better yet, if these companies do make changes against the property owner's decisions, should be prosecuted using the CFAA against the company.

Case in point: Nintendo Switch 2 is remotely destroying consoles that play a game that was ripped by someone else. If it were me, Nintendo of America's C levels would be charged with CFAA and have a nice perp-walk.

But that's the point in the USA. Companies are allowed to use Trojans and hack tools against hardware others own, but if we tried that, I'd be making this message in a jail cell.

What taxes ? In most countries you only pay property taxes on real estate, not on random items.

What taxes exactly are you referring to?

Presumably they mean something treating it more like renting a car.

E.g. if a game console manufacturer wants to retain owner-level control of their console, they can rent it to you for $X per month, which would include a Y% sales/VAT/GST/whatever tax.

And correspondingly if the device is sold to you, they should not be able to do things like disallow you from running custom software, remotely brick the device with a soft fuse, etc. and otherwise stop you from using it freely.

I think there is a middle ground (e.g. you can buy the console and either have it in "secure" mode as it ships from the factory, or choose to "root" the device and gain the ability to run custom code - perhaps this would invalidate the manufacturer's attestation keys from the secure enclave or burn a soft fuse as part of the process, so it no longer passes checks for DRM and so on). However that may not be economically viable as I understand the consoles are often loss leaders on the hardware and the profit is made on game sales and licensing.

Thanks. I agree.

My question was referring specifically to the “not paying taxes”. TTBOMK, in all western jurisdiction, sales/vat/etc/income taxes on sales are equal to or higher than those owed on rental income - and op kept repeating (in multiple responses) that misclassifying a rental as a sale is a tax fraud for the seller/original-owner. That makes no sense to me.

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