Tennessee to Tax Software as Property?

thatkidkel writes "The Chattanooga Times Free Press is reporting that 'a state board is proposing a sweeping change to make computer software used in business subject to property taxes, a move that some business leaders contend could drive up costs and hurt job growth in Tennessee.'"

Comments

Re:chunk o' change!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

From The Fine Article:

"This would be a significant chunk of change," said Hayes Ledford, the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerces director of public affairs.

That pretty much seems to say it all when public officials view taxation as "significant chunks of change", rather than the basis for sustaining government and infrastructure.

You might have a point if he actually was a public official. The chamber of commerce is a business organization, not an arm of the government. Their purpose is to help each other out, which sometimes includes lobbying the state, but that does not make any of them "public officials."

Re:Do we own it

[MaggieL]

How do you tax a revokeable roight-to-use as property?...Maybe they can tax the right to vote, and other abstractions as well.

No more outlandish than the idea that an algorithm or a business method, or a gene sequence can be property. Of course, that's pretty outlandish.

Heinlein fans among us will recall a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land describing a Tennessee statute setting the value of pi to be exactly 3. But Snopes tells us it was apparently the Indiana House of Representatives who unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi.

I have yet to see the politician who can resist a brand new source of revenue to pocket simply because "it's a bad idea" or "it makes no sense".

Re:Do we own it

[PatrickThomson]

GNU software actually followers the copyrightable method where the author(s) chooses to give up rights to his software.

Sorry, you're wrong. I won't patronise you and explain how you're wrong, but I'd just like to say that it's innacurate simplifications like this that lead to the public mindset of GPL software as being "usable by anyone for any purpose", undermining its credibility in the public eye and leading to poorly-informed software companies infringing without realising and then trying to cover it up when they find out that 80% of the code they wrote is technically GPL.

it's true what they say, the best way to get people to believe something is to repeat it incessantly. The GPL is by no means free code, or code that's given away. There's no monetary return, but there is a strict legal expectation of ideas flowing both ways. If you use it, one way or another, you'll pay. Of course, most of us are paying what we'd gladly share, under identical conditions.