Dagmar wrote:
Well, this is simply the biggest pile of crap I've seen from any gov't in a few days at least.

Philadelphia has decided that bloggers must pay for a $300 licence.

WTF. Since when did free speech so decidedly turn into "fee speech"?

If Nashville tries this, I'll send them a picture of my "special" finger.

This is a tempest in a tea pot. This is at least the third time I can remember seeing roughly the same story in one city or another. Eventually some blogger who is actually generating real revenue gets contacted by a local city that had a business registration requirement, and the blogospher blows up... There is no "blog tax" in Philly.

Anyone doing business and generating revenue for profit needs to get a business license from the city in Philly. It's a heavily regulated city. This is completely normal in many (most?) American cities. I'm not sure if Nashville has a business registration requirement, but the state does.

If you are generating revenue, all standard federal, state, and/or local regulation (tax or otherwise) applies. Blog, lemon-aid stand, prostitute.. Doesn't matter.

If you generate $10 of revenue from your blog a year, does this matter? No.. Not unless you are _really_ anal. The feds, the state, and/or local city are not going to care (or prosecute) for that level of tax liability. [disclaimer: i'm not a lawyer]

On the other hand, if you generate a few thousand dollars a year, you should treat your blog as a business from a financial accounting and reporting perspective. Some common sense applies here..

In our case, we follow every rule and regulation applicable to running a business even though our revenue is shit. MemeStreams pays taxes, is a registered business, registered trademark, has it's own bank accounts, keeps detailed financial records, et cetera. We pay very little tax, but we keep the Industrial Memetics ops completely on the up.