Comment by jandrewrogers 8 days ago
That doesn’t follow. Code can contain extremely sensitive and/or valuable IP independent of the value of the code as an asset. Reduction to practice frequently fails to produce usable software.
That is making assumptions that aren’t based in reality. Serious software R&D stopped relying on patents and copyrights years ago because they are effectively non-enforceable in many cases.
A significant percentage of algorithm and foundational computer science R&D in software is now protected exclusively via trade secrets. There are no other practical options. This wasn’t always the case but all other forms of protection have steadily eroded over the last couple decades.
Weaponizing the tax code because you have an ideological aversion to trade secrets doesn’t seem fair to me.
It's not really "weaponizing the tax code because of an ideological aversion"; it's more:
* It makes sense to tax capital assets as such.
* If companies do R&D and think the results are valuable enough to be kept secret, then obviously they're an asset.
* Depreciation is because real-world assets actually require ongoing maintenance or become worthless over time, but information does not.
* Finite-term IP grants (e.g. copyrights/patents) do become worthless over time, so a depreciation schedule makes sense.
* Trade secrets never expire, so it doesn't make sense to depreciate them. If they never get out, they remain an asset forever. So their development shouldn't be deductible. If they do get out, the company could release all of their (now presumably useless) info on it then for the deduction from their development.
The point about finding trade secrets to be dubious is that it seems natural to tax them as an everlasting capital asset (since that's what they are), and I don't see why we wouldn't do that since society doesn't eventually get the benefit of that knowledge, so incentivizing it runs counter to the purpose of IP law. Why would a knowledge economy provide a tax deduction for developing knowledge we don't eventually get?
That's why I didn't just include code; if you produced valuable design docs as part of your work, that was part of your research too. I'm generally skeptical of the societal utility to offering any protections or special treatment for trade secrets though (the entire point of patents/copyright is to incentivize people to share these things; it's insane to also protect their secrecy), so that no doubt affects my thinking. If you want the deduction for having spent money on R&D that you didn't think was valuable, prove it by giving it up. If it's entangled in other secrets you don't want to share, you get no deduction. Seems fair to me.