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Deleting and destroying finished movies

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Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#141

Post by antasvara »

gruez wrote: post #130
AlbertCory wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the IRS's eyes, you destroyed an item that had value. Its value was whatever someone was willing to pay for it. Say $30M. If you destroyed it, that was your choice, but you didn't thereby incur a loss of $30M. Any more than if you had dynamited your HQ building.

>If you destroyed it, that was your choice, but you didn't thereby incur a loss of $30M. Any more than if you had dynamited your HQ building. Where's the line between "dynamited your HQ building" and "investing money into FTX"? Both are intentional activities that leads to total loss of value, but I think most people would agree that the latter is tax deductible.

Did your investment of money in FTX cause it to fail? Because that's what destroying a building is: an intentional choice by a company to destroy an asset that it owns.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#142

Post by tpmoney »

blincoln wrote: post #14

Seems like a less controversial solution would be to allow the same tax write-off if the studio releases the film for free distribution (e.g. via the Internet Archive), either into the public domain, or under a license like Creative Commons Noncommercial if there's concern about implicitly allowing derivative works by competitors or similar.

That seems even worse for all the people affected doesn't it? Anyone who had residual contracts now not only gets nothing like they were before, but their work is still actually being distributed, even if the studio in question is getting nothing for it. I feel like the first court case we'd see after something like this would be all the actors suing some "Rejectflix" company that springs up to provide a curated streaming site for these things.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#143

Post by tpmoney »

nerdponx wrote: post #55
advael wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the tax writeoff should only be available for doing something like that. It's insane that corporations failing at ventures is so incentivised that they'll fail on purpose, and we shouldn't be offering tax breaks for behavior that serves no public good This kind of law is especially offensive in the context of rhetoric about social programs, wherein we create all sorts of onerous means-testing on the logic tha…

I don't understand the move in the first place. Do tax write offs for corporations work differently than for people? What's the point of spending $90m just to reduce your taxable income by $90m? It's not like corporations have progressive tax brackets. Or did they acquire the movie as part of the acquisition, and are now somehow able to claim a write-off for something they didn't actually spend any money on?

No it doesn't work differently and the framing of all of this in the media is terrible. No one goes into making a movie planning on writing it off. They made a movie and decided that it was actually not going to be something worth releasing / unable to recoup the expenses, so they're not releasing it. This happens all the time with movies at all sorts of various stages of production. It just so happened this movie was "finished" before the decision was made. If they'd done this 6 months earlier than they did before it was "finished" no one would care.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#144

Post by gruez »

antasvara wrote: post #141
gruez wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you destroyed it, that was your choice, but you didn't thereby incur a loss of $30M. Any more than if you had dynamited your HQ building. Where's the line between "dynamited your HQ building" and "investing money into FTX"? Both are intentional activities that leads to total loss of value, but I think most people would agree that the latter is tax deductible.

Did your investment of money in FTX cause it to fail? Because that's what destroying a building is: an intentional choice by a company to destroy an asset that it owns.

What about "destroying all copies of the movie except one, then moving that onto a sd card you got off aliexpress"? Sure, that's a pretty dumb thing to do, but arguably so was investing into FTX.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#145

Post by gruez »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #136
lisper wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every tax dollar you don't pay is a dollar someone else has to pay instead, or a dollar that gets added to the national debt. And burning your house down and writing off the depreciated value is absolutely not legal. > Assuming you burn it in a legal, controlled manner and not arson. Yes, well, that is a might big assumption. I doubt you could point me to a single instance of someone actually burning down their house…

>Every tax dollar you don't pay is a dollar someone else has to pay instead, or a dollar that gets added to the national debt. And burning your house down and writing off the depreciated value is absolutely not legal. nobody is entitled tax revenue. Laws generally support taxes on income/profit, and arent just a bill. It isn't illegal to work less and pay less taxes. It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so…

>It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so you dont have to pay property or sales tax on it.

Generally property taxes are on the land and its improvements (eg. houses), so burning down the house wouldn't relieve you of property tax obligations. Moreover, destroying the house would actually reduce your tax obligations, and AFAIK isn't illegal.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#147

Post by s1artibartfast »

gruez wrote: post #145
s1artibartfast wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every tax dollar you don't pay is a dollar someone else has to pay instead, or a dollar that gets added to the national debt. And burning your house down and writing off the depreciated value is absolutely not legal. nobody is entitled tax revenue. Laws generally support taxes on income/profit, and arent just a bill. It isn't illegal to work less and pay less taxes. It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so…

>It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so you dont have to pay property or sales tax on it. Generally property taxes are on the land and its improvements (eg. houses), so burning down the house wouldn't relieve you of property tax obligations. Moreover, destroying the house would actually reduce your tax obligations, and AFAIK isn't illegal.

It would relieve you of property tax for the house, which is my point.

It would also allow you to avoid taxes on the sale of the house.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#148

Post by gruez »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #147
gruez wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so you dont have to pay property or sales tax on it. Generally property taxes are on the land and its improvements (eg. houses), so burning down the house wouldn't relieve you of property tax obligations. Moreover, destroying the house would actually reduce your tax obligations, and AFAIK isn't illegal.

It would relieve you of property tax for the house, which is my point. It would also allow you to avoid taxes on the sale of the house.

So you're saying that you can't demolish buildings on your own property (or at least not without rebuilding another of equal value), because that would lead to the city/county getting less taxes? That seems utterly absurd. What's next, not being able to paint the inside of your house puke yellow, which would also tank property values?

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#150

Post by advael »

loughnane wrote: post #139
advael wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, eliminating a perverse tax incentive doesn't "force" anyone to do anything. Why is it self-evident that we should subsidize failure at the level of a corporation to prevent balance sheets going negative, especially when we are so against doing the same for an individual to prevent them from becoming homeless?

Don’t think it’s self-evident. My point was only that if I were to accept OPs argument I’d have to accept them larger argument to abolish the existing subsidies, and the article didn’t persuade me that to do so is the best way to go. I’d like to read an argument against subsidizing development.

One argument is that that particular kind of subsidy is incredibly easy to game, and so you tend to create more reward-hacking than actual benefit
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