Taxes and IP export laws
Monday, September 21st, 2009 | General
It turns out that the export of Intellectual Property or licensing of it to people outside of South Africa is supposed to be regulated by government institutions. It’s essentially the same as exporting and importing of physical goods. So I’m meeting with a specialist in the field tomorrow to discuss my entire setup and make sure I’m not breaking any international laws. He’s also going to get me hooked up with the appropriate licenses and I’ll be able to distribute SuiteSMPP under my proposed Open Source Compatible license.
Also, from what I can see, my entire current business costs are tax deductible to approximately 150% of the value. It turns out that South Africa offers a huge tax incentive for R&D in the whole Intellectual Property space. The definition of R&D is broad enough to include the salaries of software developers. Awesome. This incentive is further sweetened for some countries outside of the Republic – including the UK, China, Belgium and others – because they can then claim deducations from both South Africa and their own governments. It’s interesting and complicated stuff.
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