Getting self-employed in a creative profession? You may have heard something about copyright.
Legally, this states you are in a strong position to ensure that your creative work is protected. And there are a lot of interesting tax implications too, and we’d love to zoom in on those!
Just a second… Our Development team is doing everything possible to get the copyright operation up and running as soon as possible. We are aiming for the end of September for this.
What do copyrights mean?
Copyright ensures that creators of original works remain in control of what happens to their work. So it protects authors (a broad term, more on that later) and their creations; the author retains control over who and how his work is distributed.
When you think of an author, you quickly think of a musician who creates a tune or a song or a writer who publishes a book. Certainly a good start, but fortunately it also goes much wider than that. A few examples:
- A copywriter who writes original slogans, blogs or manuals? Check, these creations may be copyrighted.
- A graphic designer who creates logos, posters and other creative works? Yep, this graphic work may also be covered by copyright.
To name just a few sectors of course, as you can sense there is quite a stretch on the concept of author.
Why are copyrights interesting?
To make sure you legally retain all the rights you are supposed to have to your work, on the one hand. On the other hand, this also has interesting tax consequences: after all, income covered by copyrights is not just income.
As always, you provide a service to your customer. If that performance (or part of it) is sufficiently creative and original, the remuneration for it (or part of it) can be labelled as copyright.
The piece of that remuneration that falls under copyright will not be taxed as ordinary income but as movable income. That is a separate tax system from the ordinary taxes you pay as a self-employed person.
On movable income, you pay only 15% taxes, a fixed percentage that does not increase. In addition, you get another nice package of flat-rate costs, costs you don’t have to prove. Thus, in reality, the real tax burden on your royalties will often be around 7.5%.
Also interesting to note, you don’t pay any social security contributions on this income!
That sounds like a lot of administration.
If you want to sort this out yourself, the administrative hassle can become quite large. Fortunately, there is a middleman who takes care of this administration, Creative Shelter.
They handle everything from licensing to administrative tasks, which simply leaves you with more from your creative performance. You can also entrust them with assessing whether a performance is (fully or partially) covered by copyright.
In purely practical terms, your sales invoices need to be drawn up slightly differently to comply with copyright legislation, but Creative Shelter takes that off your hands too. Creative Shelter provides you with the sales invoice you would normally make and you can easily process that sales invoice in Dexxter.
Discover here a practical example of how to process such an invoice in Dexxter!
For more information and to see if you qualify, take a look at the Creative Shelter website.
Just a second… Our Development team is doing everything possible to get the copyright feature up and running as soon as possible. We are aiming for the end of September.
