[gnicholas]

Interesting point. The headline refers to "salary" but the article refers to "income". The former is narrower than the latter, but both would exclude gifts, which are not considered income from a tax perspective.

I wonder what would happen if someone set up a GoFundMe that people could donate to. Gift tax wouldn't be implicated (that only applies when a single donor gives more than $16k to a single donee), and the transfer would not be income (at least so far as the tax code definition is concerned).

[jhugo]

> The former is narrower than the latter, but both would exclude gifts, which are not considered income from a tax perspective.

The tax perspective is completely irrelevant here. Gifted money would absolutely be considered by the court to be available to repay the debt.

[gnicholas]

I'm curious where your certainty comes from. I happen to be a (former) lawyer, and my perspective is that it's quite possible that there are loopholes here. If there is a settlement agreement that refers to "income" then it would likely be defined in terms of taxable income, which is a generally agreed upon standard.

You refer to a court considering gifted money to be available to repay the debt. But do we know if there was a private settlement, or something that is being administered by a court? If it's a private settlement, then the court would not be able to step outside the agreement and loop in other property. They would say that Nintendo is a sophisticated party and it should have negotiated a more airtight agreement. But like I said, I don't know if this is a private settlement or something that a court is administering.

If you have access to other facts, or more nuanced reasoning, please do share!

[jhugo]

Bowser was ordered by a court to pay $4.5m restitution to Nintendo after pleading guilty to two criminal charges (the specific charges he pled guilty to are unclear, but he was charged with fraud, DMCA circumvention, conspiracy and others). Separately, Nintendo brought a civil suit against him, and the court entered a judgement in favour of Nintendo (following a consent agreement) for $10m.

These are debts that Bowser owes, and whether certain of his income is taxable or not is not relevant to whether it is available to pay those debts. A "private settlement" would still be very unlikely to contain some specific list of sources of income that were affected by the debt.

Should he decide to adopt your (very strange, especially for a former lawyer) stance in your grandparent comment that non-taxable income would somehow be, by virtue of its tax treatment, shielded from these debts, he would simply find himself back in court for failing to pay.