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Deleting and destroying finished movies

rogerebert.com

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Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#261

Post by Veserv »

cryptonym wrote: post #255
Veserv wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is easy. If they claim the contract-encumbered work is worth 0 dollars for tax reasons, then anybody (who does not intend to commit breach of contract) should be allowed to buy the fully encumbered work for 0 dollars and the original owner can take the loss/write-off. That should get like the central 90% of cases. Probably need some fine-tuning to get the rest and reduce opportunities for abuse (maybe some minim…

I create multiple movies, one works well and I think to myself I pay too much taxes this year. I sell the next one for 0 dollars to my cousin so I can write it off immediately. If the movie works, money stays in the family, if it doesn't I already got deductions and it was a no-op for my cousin.

Oh no, you are presenting a simple problem that would take you, cryptonym, all of 30 seconds to figure out a solution to since you are obviously smart enough to think things through. In fact, you could even cheat by looking at the other responder who responded before you suggesting a public auction which is what I was alluding to by saying "anybody" as in you must allow all people (within reason) to compete to purchase, not choose a specific person.

Can you try to spend 30 seconds countering whatever problems you came up with and only then propose non-trivial problems? I promise I gave the idea more than 30 seconds of thought and did think of the obvious problems, it is just tiring to exhaustively list out and pedantically enumerate a complete proposal instantiated for this specific domain. That is also why I explicitly said it solves the central 90% and would require tuning and mechanisms to reduce abuse since I do, in fact, know the proposal is incomplete, just that the problems I am aware of with this class of solution generally appear to be quite amenable to solutions that should be at least as robust as the status quo.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#262

Post by konschubert »

imgabe wrote: post #197
AlbertCory wrote: post #22

Where do you draw the line? If an artist pays a model and paints her, is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting because it sucks, and because the model wants credit? What about a music producer who pays a studio band to record a song that turns out to be terrible -- is the producer prohibited from deleting it? It's the tax write off for destruction that's fucked up, as @cnees says. Failures are part…

The line is at claiming a loss for tax purposes. Destroy the film if you like, but then you get no tax break. There's a similarity with the "hobby loss rule". In order to be a valid business who can deduct business expenses like losses, you have to demonstrate that you have a "profit intent". That means that you make at least an attempt to turn a profit on your work. If you don't, it's considered a hobby and you don'…

I don’t get your point. If you run a business, money that you spend is subtracted from your earnings.

Are you alleging that they made the money for fun? That they never intended to release it?

That’s they spent 10 dollars to save 3 dollars in taxes?

And then you pay taxes on earnings.

That’s not cheating and it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#263

Post by konschubert »

AlbertCory wrote: post #22

Where do you draw the line? If an artist pays a model and paints her, is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting because it sucks, and because the model wants credit? What about a music producer who pays a studio band to record a song that turns out to be terrible -- is the producer prohibited from deleting it? It's the tax write off for destruction that's fucked up, as @cnees says. Failures are part…

If the market value was nonzero, why would they be scrapping it?

They could still count the delta between their production cost and the money they got as a loss and deduct that from their taxable income, no?

They have no incentive to underestimate the value of the final product.

Income - expenses = taxable earnings.

As a business, the money you get by earning a dollar is always bigger than the taxes you pay on it.

If they’re scrapping it, they are clearly deciding that the cost of finishing and marketing this movie is greater than the value of the movie.

What am I missing?

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#264

Post by [deleted] »

konschubert wrote: post #263
AlbertCory wrote: post #22

Where do you draw the line? If an artist pays a model and paints her, is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting because it sucks, and because the model wants credit? What about a music producer who pays a studio band to record a song that turns out to be terrible -- is the producer prohibited from deleting it? It's the tax write off for destruction that's fucked up, as @cnees says. Failures are part…

If the market value was nonzero, why would they be scrapping it? They could still count the delta between their production cost and the money they got as a loss and deduct that from their taxable income, no? They have no incentive to underestimate the value of the final product. Income - expenses = taxable earnings. As a business, the money you get by earning a dollar is always bigger than the taxes you pay on it. If…

[deleted]

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#265

Post by andybak »

AlbertCory wrote: post #22

Where do you draw the line? If an artist pays a model and paints her, is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting because it sucks, and because the model wants credit? What about a music producer who pays a studio band to record a song that turns out to be terrible -- is the producer prohibited from deleting it? It's the tax write off for destruction that's fucked up, as @cnees says. Failures are part…

I don't believe that the artist's wishes should always win out. We would have lost Kafka if his wishes were followed.

I don't believe copyright should always win out. We nearly lost Nosferatu.

As for ownership? We lost a wonderful portrait of Churchill because it displeased his wife.

There are countless lost works - late Sibelius, a ton of Brahms, Bacon and Monet paintings. History judges such things severely.

Unless you believe in a specific variant of life-after-death then an artist's wishes only carry moral weight whilst they are still around. Destruction has effects that last forever.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#266

Post by littlestymaar »

jb1991 wrote: post #242
littlestymaar wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had it been 105 year it would have been an order of magnitude. Being only 5 years off an order of magnitude justified the “almost an order of magnitude”.

> Had it been 105 year it would have been an order of magnitude That’s not true. How are you getting that number? That’s not how you calculate an order of magnitude.

You don't “calculate” orders of magnitude, that the point of manipulating them in the first place. And an order of magnitude colloquially means “one more digit”, hence the original remark.

I appreciate the irony of nitpicking about a concept that merely exist to allow for low precision napkin math.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#267

Post by lisper »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #220
lisper wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then sell it Yes, but you have to sell it, at which point it's a capital loss. And you can sell the movie and take a loss that way as well (assuming you actually sell it at a loss). What you cannot do is delete the movie and then claim it as a capital loss -- because you haven't sold it.

If you kock down your house, you literally cant sell it. Also, there are multiple ways of changing asset value besides sale.

If you really want to get technical about it, in the vast majority of legal jurisdictions it is not possible to sell a house in isolation. You sell the land that the house is sitting on, and the house just comes along for the ride as an "improvement". So whatever legal abstraction you could sell before you tore the house down you can also sell after.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#268

Post by pawelmurias »

zokier wrote: post #91
fl7305 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting Perhaps not prohibited. But we could make it so they lose all IP rights. Copyright is intended to promote the creation and distribution of new works. It is not a natural human right, like ownership of your physical things.

In what sense is ownership of physical things natural human right?

There are biological instincts to defend your stuff. Like animals will attack you when you try to steal their things.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#269

Post by kryptiskt »

If they released the movie to the public domain and set up a torrent, wouldn't the value of it be zero to them? And that in an even more irrevocable manner than destroying the copies they have (since you can never be sure that anyone has squirreled it away). Then they would get literally all the critics off their back.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#270

Post by MrNeon »

arpa wrote: post #250
s1artibartfast wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They're deliberately forgoing those options and deleting it. You don't have a loss until you attempt to generate revenue and find that the revenue is less than your expenses. If you just throw your product away, that's not a loss. That is exactly how it works. You already spent X on an asset. If you throw the asset away, then you just have deductible expenses. Same for the widget factory. You can deduct the material…

Maybe at some size corporations _should_ become public entities to avoid dragon disease and only those corporations having the means of production. After all, they did grow enormously big by consuming public resources and labor.

Neither the resources or the labor are public.
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