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Warner Bros. is now erasing games as it plans to delist Adult Swim-published titles
(www.polygon.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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This practice feels like something that should be illegal. Effectively it is destroying art that hundreds or thousands of people worked hard to make, for the sake of fiddling the books of the owning company that commissioned it.
If you "write it off" to be worth zero, it should either become freely available abandonware, or can be claimed as the intellectual property of those that worked on it. Otherwise it is evident that there is some value to be had and therefore tax fraud to claim it has none.
I agree with you. If a company writes off something in order to make it with zero, then that thing should immediately fall into the public domain.
You would have to have another law that says that anything significantly devalued must be able to be purchased for the stated value. Otherwise they will just say it's worth $1.
It's crazy that WB is getting away with blatant tax fraud. I can't claim my house is worth $0 in order to pay no taxes yet WB can say, "This media is worth $0 for tax purposes."
i wonder if devs would rather have their work eventually erased like it never existed and never pirated or preserved and appreciated by people
Back when WB threatened to block the release of a finished series on HBO Max (Summer Camp Island), the creator more or less threatened to leak it herself. I think most devs would feel the same. At least I would. Not like it's making them any money either way.