Writing Online - by Alrady: Licensing your opinion

August 24, 2010

Licensing your opinion | San Francisco Examiner

This op- ed piece in the SF examiner has the skinny on why the fat cats are wrong! I had to blog this as follow-up. TOUCHE and KUDOS to

CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR for a great expose on this topic

Licensing your opinion | San Francisco Examiner: "That will show you to be honest and up front. The money she makes from her blog, like most of us, is so little that she didn't actually owe any, but she filed anyway. The city, strapped for cash and hungry for new sources of revenue began mailing out demands that people buy a business license for their blogs.

Here's the problem for Philadelphia: a blog isn't a business. Sure you can make money at it, although very few make even enough to do it for a living, but writing opinion articles and little silly posts about your cat is not a business. Not any more than writing for a newspaper or writing a novel about your experiences as a child growing up in West Nubnuck Arkansas.

The city wants to claim that bloggers are covered under the business license law, pointing to a legal clause:

'engaged in any 'activity for profit,' says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies 'whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year,' he adds.

The flaw with this attitude is that not every action done for profit is actually a business. Writers are typically considered artists and freelancers, not businessmen."

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