Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Non-Shit-Talk of Your Day
Today I made it so that frontrowcrew.com automatically tweets out a link to an old episode every morning.
Comments
(I hope to post to this thread by tonight or tomorrow for my own shit-talking aka PROJECT ST!)
- I figured out how much money I have to pay and what forms I have to fill out to legally sell T-shirts online. (I am confident that almost noone we know in the podcasting world is doing this fully legally).
- I arranged an event for us this Saturday (details TBA).
- I video synced all of the tracks from our Project ST work the other weekend.
All in all, not a bad day.I also got to work on getting into the UIUC honors college of Molecular and Cellular Bio. So begins my slow march towards multiple doctorates!
Guh. To sell a few tshirts online, I'm going to have to regularly (quarterly) file sales tax reports to New York, even if I don't sell anything to anyone in New York. I spoke with someone on the government question hotline, only to discover that no one involved at any level even understands what I'm trying to do.
G: "So, you're manufacturing the clothes in Queens?"
R: "No, just selling them online."
G: "From your store."
R: "Yes."
G: "You'll need x requirements fulfilled before you can let customers enter the store. You also need to set up waste management."
R: "It's an online store."
G: "..."
R: "There's no physical store. It's a web site. People buy things from the web site."
G: "So where is your business?"
R: "My apartment."
G: "Well, you need to meet all of those requirements to let your customers into you apartment."
R: "No one will ever enter my apartment: it's an online store only."
G: "Then where is your business?"
R: "..."
G: "Where do you manufacture the clothes? Your apartment?"
R: "No, I just order them from someone else."
G: "What does your company intend to do exactly?"
R: "Sell Tshirts to promote our podcast."
G: "Podcast?"
R: "Like a radio show, but on the Internet."
G: "Ahh, radio! You have to do x unrelated things before you can broadcast."
R: "..."
I might be able to get around some of this if we simply refuse to sell to anyone in New York State.
Of course, I am not authorizing this currently. Legally, I need to license the trademarks for GeekNights and/or Front Row Crew to you in order to protect them. A standard license for anyone who wants to design shirts has thus been added to my queue.
1. Legal bullshit
2. Tshirt store with the original tshirt and poster
3. Standard contract for licensing our trademarks (probably a penny for lifetime rights)
4. Our own new Tshirt designs to be added to the store
5. User-generated tshirts to be sold if they're popular
Creative Commons is awesome, but I've realized several points at which it is incompatible with or dangerous in light of trademark law (as opposed to copyright law). The moral: don't make and distribute any Tshirts using "GeekNights" or "Front Row Crew" trademarks at this time. I am legally obligated to say as much. Rest assured, I will sort this out as soon as I am able, as I look forward to community-driven shirt designs. ^_^
It's all just legal BS now that we're trying to do things legit. ;^)
Happily, we've proven ownership and use of both pretty handily, making the process much simpler than it otherwise might have been.
Of course then I moved to NY... so I'm in the process of figuring out what to register all over again. Fucking NY and their different sales tax rates for every fucking county... >_<
The crux of the issue is that America hates hobbyists. Between the registration fees, the tax hoops, and the CPSIA requirements, it is practically impossible for anyone trying to do anything small-scale to comply with every law regulating them. Because of that, many people just say "fuck it" and don't register anything at all. You lose more money on the time you spend preparing the admin stuff than you make from your sales. There really ought to be a specific exemption for people below a certain annual amount of business.
I wonder if perhaps you could find a way to classify your business as something else. Internet sales are closer in spirit to a mail-order company that doesn't operate its own warehouse. Maybe try that approach?
Unless you're starting anywhere that sells or manufactures food or drink, then you're in for a world of hurt. And by hurt, I mean Paperwork, inspections, restrictions, and lots of other rigmarole.
The government here takes anything to do with Food-and-drink based businesses SUPER seriously.
Though, on the flip-side, you can get everything but vessels and equipment(Well, I suppose, unless you really need some super esoteric stuff) for brewing down here in damn near every supermarket(in some, you can even buy small amounts of bottles), and Distilling equipment is freely bought and sold, there are even speciality stores for it. Within 24 hours from this point, I could have any brew of about a half dozen types fermenting away in the back shed without signifigant effort.
Though, I have seen people sell beer and liquor at market, by simply saying they're for cooking, not consumption, and wine is regularly seen at markets.
Funny enough, I'm in very nearly the same position as Rym, except that the stuff I'm trying to do involves even more hoops and expenses. Either of us could do what we want to do on the shady side of things, but it's a really really bad idea.
Also, in no way do I advocate circumventing extant regulations for the purposes of conducting business, or for any other purpose, nor do my comments reflect the endorsement of such action by the Department of Agriculture and Markets.
/ass, meet cover