Slashdot Mirror
Patents on Tax Reduction Strategies a Problem
EsonLinji writes "The International Herald Tribune has an article about how some lawyers are realising that patents on tax reduction strategies (a business method) might be a problem. The article states that there are already 50 such patents with more on the way, and at least one lawsuit. Particularly worrying is the idea of needing a license to follow the law. Fortunately, some of the laws get that this is a problem. Tax patents, the lawyers wrote, amount to 'government-issued barbed wire' to keep some taxpayers from getting equal treatment under the tax code."
Finally, someone was dumb enough to rock the patent boat silly.
/read common man/ to take notice that something is just a bit wrong. Unfortunately, I don't forsee any great changes to come until wealthy men start losing out to those less fortunate. A good ol' fashioned robin hood approach to the matter could very well upset things just enough to make some real changes.
Granted, these will probably be killed due to certain issues... like aformentioned blurb mention.
However, it might just be enough to get more people
I will make it quite simple. Rich people don't care if poor get poorer. Rich people don't care if they lose wealth to other rich people. Rich people do care if they lose wealth to poor people. You just can go around upsetting the natural balance of things.
Yes, over the top a bit and a bit absurb, but I think I can get a few people behind my new campaign slogan.
Vote Cylix 2008!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Okay, so let me get this straight...
The gaming industry doesn't want me to make backups of my game to keep the disk from being scratched by overuse. It's infringement after all.
The recording industry won't let me put my tunes on a mix CD because that's a type of infringement too.
Now the government is going to ensure that I'm going to have to go to certain places to file my taxes this year because otherwise that's a different kind of infringement, patent infringement - and it doesn't matter if I read the law myself and saw that this is possible, because some tax firm in the middle of Texas came up with it as soon as the law was passed?
Enough is enough, already!
I'm filing my patent on looking both ways before crossing the street. Oh yeah, and a patent on not getting a traffic citation by not speeding.
How can you patent a business method on following the law? Let's forget for a moment how ridiculous a patent on business methods are in the first place.
"The first thing we do," said the character in Shakespeare's Henry VI, is "kill all the lawyers."
I don't know - if the tax dodge was obvious to the skilled accountant you would think it would be obvious to the skilled tax law draftsperson
In my observation of recent government policies and behaviors, I had concluded that the document that you referenced (Original and Amendments) was no longer in force. Was I in error? Please clarify.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Accounting firms get paid tens of millions of dollars to come up with tax hedges. It isn't all that obvious what they are doing in many cases.
For instance, one older tax hedge -- not listed specifically in any laws -- involved forming a specific type of investment trust which purchased secured deed liens bonds of oil piplines, then reselling the interests in the trust. Using this method, the income from said trusts could be treated as operating (rather than investment) income by the holders in due course. This allowed them to prevent required liquidation (and subsequent taxation) of retained earnings in a C corp which had since converted to an S corp.
If 1 click puchasing counts as non-obvious, the above is not even questionable.
Oh, wow, so NOW someone patents something that pinches lawyers, and it's "ZOMG! WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT!!!" from the lawyers, and all this business method patenting bullshit that has been going on for decades gets nary a finger wave all this time?
I'm shocked. Truly.
Even beyond the fact that patenting something has to do with obeying the laws of the land, the whole notion of patenting business methods (and many forms of software patents as well) was and has always been absurd and self-destructive.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Hey, tax lawyers should not get it any easier than engineers. The first to invent gets the patent, unless there is published prior art that the patent examiner can find in a three-hour search. Otherwise the patent is granted. Later on, it may be possible to challenge the validity of the patent if you are sued for infringement. That's how we give incentives for technical innovations, so why would the same incentives not work on legal innovations?
But what if one gets tax advice from overseas where they don't accept silly patent laws?
Table-ized A.I.
No patents on tax increases?
Who needs a patent when you have a monopoly?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Good point. But until this is 'noticed' by the courts, there are some further worrying questions. One is that there is nothing specific about patenting 'business methods' related to tax law, as opposed to other branches of law, as far as I can see. So, why not patent a type of defense in criminal law? Not that this topic is funny, but imagine for humor's sake "Plan B" from The Practice or "the Chewbacca Defense" from South Park being patented.
"Ain't democracy great?"
Right there is the prime reason why people are getting more and more cynical about this entire democracy thing: here, democracy has degenerated into a simple oligarchy, where the group in power is the group with money. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years, the US would have the same political system that China has now: a central party that is in name democratic, but in practice completely static, and where ascension to posts comes strictly through internal power struggles.
I'm really not one for doomsday scenarios, but I have to say that this kind of crap is how people get disenfranchised and the idea that they have nothing to lose anymore. And what do people do who feel they have nothing to lose? They revolt. Feh.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
...is that the patents are based on something that may not remain the same for the life of the patent.
If I patent a tax avoidance scheme that involves, say, investing in a rainforest planting scheme to get a tax break (grossly simplified example) and that tax break is removed in the next budget then the patent is no longer valid.
One of the principles of patent law is that a patent is a disclosure: in exchange for protection on your invention you provide instructions on how to implement the invention. If it's not implementable the patent is invalid - this is where those perpetual motion machines that slip through from time to time get knobbled.
As a patent examiner cannot be certain that the "model" of the patent will work for the term of the patent they shouldn't grant it.
Or, of course, the next US administration could implement an intellectual property regime that doesn't look like an unseemly land grab, and then spend all its time in the WTO trying to persuade the rest of us to follow suit.
I think the USPTO should start rubber stamping patents on legal strategy, what better way to bring the entire house of cards crashing down?
It had better be hearsay, because coming from someone who has sworn to uphold and defend the constitution, it is nothing less than treason.
I could see some "abuse" with it though. I, for one, would simply live like a pauper until I saved up enough money to start making decent returns on conservative investments.
And why, exactly would that be a bad thing?
The fact is that under our present system, the bulk of the money comes from the middle class. If you make a million bucks in a year and actually pay the AMT or the full nominal amount for that tax bracket, then you simply have an incompetent accountant. Rich people can keep their money in the bahamas, they can buy "farms" that pay them subsidies for growing weeds, they can "invest" in whatever harebrained schemes have the favor of the right congresscritters this year, they can hold "charity" parties where they spend millions to raise thousands, and the list goes on and on.
Besides the benefit of efficiency of tax collection itself, we'd also see great improvements in our economy due to businesses being able to make decsions based on return on investment, without regard to tax consequences (since the tax consequences are always the same: you pay tax on what you spend.
Add to that the several trillions of dollars currently held in offshore accounts that would likely be repatriated to the United States (no need for a tax shelter anymore), and you have a recipe for a lot of people being able to improve their lot in life.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
he's also called US T-bills 'worthless pieces of paper' or something to that effect. which is also unconstitutional. so it's a pattern.
then again, i never was a fan of that amendment, as it seems to counter the first.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
It strikes me that there is a simple obviousness test here
Tax code? Obvious? Let me be the first to say: BAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA *rolls on floor laughing*
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The definition used to be whether the new invention would be obvious to a "Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art" (PHOSITA) So basically, you'd take your average tax boy and see if this would have been obvious to him based on the prior art.
Unfortunately, the case law is in such a state that the "Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art" is no longer the standard by which obviousness is judged. Currently, we look to the prior art and see if there's any "suggestion or motivation" to combine the prior art in such a way as to cover the claimed invention. And we interpret "suggestion or motivation" very narrowly so that pretty much nothing is obvious anymore.
Balance the f'ing budget
Try to be deft enough at foreign policy that you do not get most of the rest of the world pissed off at you.
When striking at your enemy, prefer a swift lance in the right place versus an avalanche in the general area.
Read Sun Tzu.
Remember that the "goddamn piece of paper" written about 230 years ago helped make us the most respected country in the world at one time, and was specifically intended to protect us from the worst of leaders, not those that we trust.
Constrict the ability of lobbies to buy our government policies, criticize your elected officials with reasoned arguments, accept the inevitable fact that your views are not absolutely "right", don't use all caps in your Slashdot subject line, limit your government to doing the things that only government can do well, think for yourself (at length).
Question why you believe what you believe, as if it was a scientific question -- which of course it never will be.
Put your neocortex in control of your verbal/written output, as opposed to your limbic system.
Failing all of the above, stew in your own juices and try to avoid ad hominem attacks. If you find a perfect way of doing this, let me know or patent it.
BTW, if I had to label myself it would be as a centrist-conservative, but any label now carries so much stupid baggage that I try to avoid any one of them. "More power to the Party of Thinking People" -- Oh Shit, there isn't one.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Any law is voluntary. You can ignore them as much as you want, so long as you don't mind prison.
Wait, I'm confused. What does logic have to do with lawyers? ;)
No, you're 100% incorrect.
I honestly don't know why that meme is still floating around the interwebs. The guy at capitolhillblue was the only person to push this story and he did it with anonymous sources.
If you read here it has the followup article CHB wrote 3 days later, titled "Where there's smoke, there's ire" which CHB pulled from his own site
"This article has been removed from our database because the source could not be verified."
It surprises me that he repeats the same claim just a week ago
Not to mention that he first claims he heard it from 3 sources, then later changed it to two sources. The man reported shiat either he or someone else made up.
I honestly don't care about getting modded up, but please mod down the AC.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Patience.
It's a matter of time before the remains of SCO patent the use of patent lawsuits as a business model. The hope would be to get into a lawsuit over that patent, creating a potential infinite recursion and thereby an infinite revenue stream out of thin air. :p
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't know - if the tax dodge was obvious to the skilled accountant you would think it would be obvious to the skilled tax law draftsperson
Too bad there are so few of those in Congress. If a CEO signed without reading as often as Congressmen vote without reading, he would end up in jail. Congress also has a habit of 'patching' existing legislation which is itself a patch to a patch. When they do that, they apparently never bother to look at what will result when the patches are applied in order.
Put in development terms, imagine if the source for the 2.6.18 linux kernel consisted of a copy of the first .c file Linus ever wrote and a time ordered series of patches that will result in kernel 2.6.18 iff they are applied in order. Now imagine that instead of doing that and then running make, make, gcc, and friends go through the patch process themselves internally so that the final form of the source never touches the disk. Finally, changes are made by directly editing a .diff file and tossing it into the pile, never actually looking at the final resulting source code.
Should the bits not fit together, your must rent an advanced compiler module that guesses what was intended and tosses a patch of it's own into another pile to be automatically processed. There are dozens of different compiler modules all of which guess differently. The compiler may or may not choose to look at that second pile when formulating it's guesses. The developers may or may not choose to move a patch from the second pile to the first pile.
In order to get a diff tossed into the pile, someone writes it, gives it an informative name and then the developers vote on it. For example, the change that makes Xco's proprietary bubblesorter run faster than the free qsorter was named "Sort Fairness Diff". Choosing a good name is essential as the developers are busy people and often vote based on the name without reading the diff itself.
The system is considered to be perfectly open and fair since anyone at all may submit a diff or petetion for it's inclusion or exclusion. All they need to do is get a developer's attention. The best way to get that attention is to invite them to dinner at a strip club in Tahiti (for example).