Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. v. C. I. R., 81-2785

• Decision Date: 09 August 1982
• Docket Number: No. 81-2785,81-2785
• Citation: 685 F.2d 212
• Parties: 82-2 USTC P 9530 ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, INC., Petitioner-Appellee, v. COMMISSIONER OF INTERNAL REVENUE, Respondent-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 212

685 F.2d 212

82-2 USTC P 9530

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, INC., Petitioner-Appellee, v. COMMISSIONER OF INTERNAL REVENUE, Respondent-Appellant.

No. 81-2785.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued June 7, 1982.

Decided Aug. 9, 1982.

Matthew S. Cohen, Tax Div., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C., for respondent-appellant.

Arthur S. Rollin, Mayer, Brown & Platt, Chicago, Ill., for petitioner-appellee.

Before CUMMINGS, Chief Judge, POSNER, Circuit Judge, and DECKER, Senior District Judge. ^*

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

Section 162(a) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, 26 U.S.C. § 162(a), allows the deduction of "all the ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on any trade or business ...," but this is qualified (see 26 U.S.C. § 161) by section 263(a) of the Code, which forbids the immediate deduction of "capital expenditures" even if they are ordinary and necessary business expenses. We must decide in this case whether certain expenditures made by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. to acquire a manuscript were capital expenditures.

Encyclopaedia Britannica decided to publish a book to be called The Dictionary of Natural Sciences. Ordinarily it would have prepared the book in-house, but being temporarily short-handed it hired David-Stewart Publishing Company "to do all necessary research work and to prepare, edit and arrange the manuscript and all illustrative and other material for" the book. Under the contract David-Stewart agreed "to work closely with" Encyclopaedia Britannica's editorial board "so that the content and arrangement of the Work (and any revisions thereof) will conform to the idea and desires of (Encyclopaedia Britannica) and be acceptable to it"; but it was contemplated that David-Stewart would turn over a complete manuscript that Encyclopaedia Britannica would copyright, publish, and sell, and in exchange would receive advances against the royalties that Encyclopaedia Britannica expected to earn from the book.

Encyclopaedia Britannica treated these advances as ordinary and necessary business expenses deductible in the years when they were paid, though it had not yet obtained any royalties. The Internal Revenue Service disallowed the deductions and assessed deficiencies. Encyclopaedia Britannica petitioned the Tax Court for a redetermination of its tax liability, and prevailed. The Tax Court held that the expenditures were for "services" rather than for the acquisition of an asset and concluded that therefore they were deductible immediately rather than being, as the Service had ruled, capital expenditures. "The agreement provided for substantial editorial supervision by (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Indeed, David-Stewart's work product was to be the embodiment of (Encyclopaedia Britannica's) ideas and desires. David-Stewart was just the vehicle selected by (Encyclopaedia Britannica) to assist ... with the editorial phase of the Work." Encyclopaedia Britannica was "the owner of the Work at all stages of completion" and "the dominating force associated with the Work." The Service petitions for review of the Tax Court's decision pursuant to 26 U.S.C. § 7482.

As an original matter we would have no doubt that the payments to David-Stewart were capital expenditures regardless of who was the "dominating force" in the creation of The Dictionary of Natural Sciences. The work was intended to yield Encyclopaedia Britannica income over a period of years. The object of sections 162 and 263 of the Code, read together, is to match up expenditures with the income they generate. Where the income is generated over a period of years the expenditures should be classified as capital, contrary to what the Tax Court did here. From the publisher's standpoint a book is just another rental property; and just as the expenditures in putting a building into shape to be rented must be capitalized, so, logically at least, must the expenditures used to create a book. It would make no difference under this view whether Encyclopaedia Britannica hired David-Stewart as a mere consultant to its editorial board, which is the Tax Court's conception of what happened, or bought outright from David-Stewart the right to a book that David-Stewart had already published. If you hire a carpenter to build a tree house that you plan to rent out, his wage is a capital expenditure to you. See Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Idaho Power Co., 418 U.S. 1, 13, 94 S.Ct. 2757, 2764, 41 L.Ed.2d 535 (1974).

We are not impressed by Encyclopaedia Britannica's efforts to conjure up practical difficulties in matching expenditures on a book to the income from it. What, it asks, would have been the result if it had scrapped a portion of the manuscript it received from David-Stewart? Would that be treated as the partial destruction of a capital asset, entitling it to an immediate deduction? We think not. The proper analogy is to loss or breakage in the construction of our hypothetical tree house. The effect would be to increase the costs of construction, which are deductible over the useful life of the asset. If the scrapped portion of the manuscript was replaced, the analogy would be perfect. If it was not replaced, the tax consequence would be indirect: an increase or decrease in the publisher's taxable income from the published book.

What does give us pause, however, is a series of decisions in which authors of books have been allowed to treat their expenses as ordinary and necessary business expenses that are deductible immediately even though they were incurred in the creation of long-lived assets-the books the authors were writing. The leading case is Faura v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 849 (1980); it was discussed with approval just recently by a panel of the Tenth Circuit in Snyder v. United States, 674 F.2d 1359, 1365 (10th Cir. 1982), and was relied on heavily by the Tax Court in the present case.

We can think of a practical reason for allowing authors to deduct their expenses immediately, one applicable as well to publishers though not in the circumstances of the present case. If you are in the business of producing a series of assets that will yield income over a period of years-which is the situation of most authors and all publishers-identifying particular expenditures with particular books, a necessary step for proper capitalization because the useful lives of the books will not be the same, may be very difficult, since the expenditures of an author or publisher (more clearly the latter) tend to be joint among several books. Moreover, allocating these expenditures among the different books is not always necessary to produce the temporal matching of income and expenditures that the Code desiderates, because the taxable income of the author or publisher who is in a steady state (that is, whose output is neither increasing nor decreasing) will be at least approximately the same whether his costs are expensed or capitalized. Not the same on any given book-on each book expenses and receipts will be systematically mismatched-but the same on average. Under these conditions the benefits of capitalization are unlikely to exceed the accounting and other administrative costs entailed in capitalization.

Yet we hesitate to endorse the Faura line of cases: not only because of the evident tension between them and Idaho Power, supra, where the Supreme Court said that expenses, whatever their character, must be capitalized if they are incurred in creating a capital asset, but also because Faura, and cases following it such as Snyder, fail in our view to articulate a persuasive rationale for their result. Faura relied on cases holding that the normal expenses of authors and other artists are deductible business expenses rather than nondeductible personal expenses, and on congressional evidence of dissatisfaction with the Internal Revenue Service's insistence that such expenses be capitalized. See 73 T.C. at 852-61. But most of the cases in question (including all those at the court of appeals level), such as Doggett v. Burnett, 65 F.2d 191 (D.C.Cir.1933), are inapposite, because they consider only whether the author's expenditures are deductible at all-not whether, if they are deductible, they must first be capitalized.

The legislative materials relied on in Faura relate to section 2119 of the Tax Reform Act of 1976, Pub.L.94-455, 90 Stat. 1912. This provision allows publishers, until the Internal Revenue Service promulgates regulations, having prospective effect only, governing the deductibility of publishers' prepublication expenditures, to continue treating their prepublication expenditures as they have done in the past, notwithstanding Revenue Ruling 73-395, where the Service had ruled that such expenditures must be capitalized before being deducted. The enactment of section 2119 shows that Congress was unhappy with forcing publishers to capitalize their prepublication expenditures if they had...