Re:Why don't you accept donations?
by softwarebeware on Monday December 06, 2021 @05:21PM
(#29466464)
Exactly. Sure you can set up and accept money quite easily using any number of methods. The problem then comes in of how you are legally classified with each governmental jurisdiction that each donation happens to fall under, and now you're in a mountain of registrations, reports, audits, licenses, and other red tape.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
You make it sound so complicated but even 14 year old teenagers on TikTok can make it work -- everything from Venmo, Patreon, buy me a coffee type sites, Amazon wishlists. Unless you're pulling in crazy amounts of cash there's really no legal red tape for person to person gifts.
Re:Why don't you accept donations?
by franga2000 on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @03:20AM
(#29470177)
Sure they do, but it's not strictly legal. Everyone just kind of lets it slide. A gift is no longer a gift if something is expected in return (like Patreon exclusive perks) - it's a service and you can't provide a service as a regular person. Many of these creators should really be setting up companies or registering as self-employed (I'm not too familiar with the English terminology for this stuff) and then paying all the required taxes and other fees.
As soon as we're no longer talking about just teenagers on TikTok, but instead about everyone on the Web, regulators are going to want to make sure it's used legally. And we're not talking about one, but theoretically all the jurisdictions at once. Having an open standard for that sounds impossible to me and having a defacto standard corporate service (like if Google Pay became the "standard" for web payments) sounds worse than nothing.