This is hypothetical.
Suppose I visit a foreign country. I spend a lot of time taking photos with prosumer quality equipment. When I return home, I sell many of those photos either as prints to consumers or to a stock photo agency. The photos were not commissioned and no sales were arranged in advance.
Is that considered “working” for purposes of requiring a work visa?
You’d have to ask each country on Earth what their rules are. There’s no consistency.
I know that in general airline crewmembers enter a country in a special immigration category that indicates that although we are working there, we aren’t working there for host country tax purposes. Every country differs in details, but this is fairly common theme to many of them.
Some countries in fact require formal crewmember visas installed in your passport before you’re allowed to enter, even just to sleep there and leave again tomorrow. It’s a special category of visa distinct from a tourist visa or an ordinary work visa. China is one such today, and 30 years ago there were a lot more such countries.
It’s really this. With the growth of home working, I vaguely looked into this with the fantasy idea of buying a holiday home in mainland Europe. Two countries that spring to mind from that research - Denmark would allow me to work there for about 60 days straight as long as I normally reside in the UK and work for a British company, whereas France wouldn’t allow me to work there at all without paying French tax (plus all the visa schenanigans).
I don’t think either of us answered this specific question around taking photos. I am not a lawyer of any kind but do work in advertising, dealing with stock imagery. If you’re selling the photos, then you are in effect ‘working’ as a pro photographer. Now, how likely you are to get caught is another matter. But if you’re selling to an image library, your name will appear as a credit on your images, and then you’re out there as a pro photographer. Countries might demand a work visa for you to visit again.
Turning to that specific example, I often attend art shows / “fairs” where artists shill their work. Photographers selling prints on mongo-sized sheet aluminum are now a commonplace. With beautiful recognizable scenes from all over the world.
It’s implausible to me that all those folks have work permits from all the countries they visit & shoot. Despite that visit and shooting being entirely aimed at producing revenue back in the USA once they return. I tend to think of “work permits” in the context of “permission to obtain a job for pay that a local might otherwise take.”
Said another way, it’s permission to become part of the host country’s labor pool. Which is not quite the same thing as deriving revenue while there, much less deriving revenue later back home as a partial consequence of labor performed in-country. Going to extremes, if I sleep in Slobovia for 5 days and my US-based bonds in my US-based investment account back in the USA have meanwhile paid me $20 of interest, is that somehow of interest to the Slobovian tax or immigration authorities because I was sleeping in Slobovia when the money was paid to me? Obviously not*. But where’s the line?
As @SanVito says, whether that a matter of permits not being required, or permits not being practically enforceable is unknown until / unless you start asking the various host countries.
But the desire to tax passive or foreign income is/was out there everywhere. As more people work remotely, whether inter-state/inter-province or inter-country, and more self-employment or passive income gets derived similarly, these issues will be cropping up all over the world.
At one time in the past they even tried to tax the income derived from assets accrued from California wages. As in: live and work in California all your life and build up a large nest egg, then move to low-tax Florida to retire? California wanted to tax your nest-egg’s interest and dividends every year even after you live fully in Florida. Because the assets earning that interest were originally earned in CA and the interest is therefore connected enough to California to be subject to their tax authorities long arms & sticky fingers.
That created a huge hue and cry and IIRC the Feds stepped in and said in no uncertain terms that no state may do such a thing.
Of course, it would be impossible for any country to monitor the activities of every person with a smart phone, but the theory stands. If you’re doing something that has commercial value, you’re working. If the work is for a market or employer back home, you’re basically remote working.
There are a million ways you might be working (temporarily) in a country and not taking jobs from the locals - my example of doing my job occasionally from my fantasy holiday home in France for my employer and clients in the UK is just one. France still wants a work visa and my income tax!
It makes me laugh how many holiday companies are jumping on the ‘remote working’ bandwagon, advertising that you can work from anywhere. There’s never any mention of the visa or tax implications.
Some countries are catching on though, with the likes of Portugal and Spain now offering ‘remote working’ visas.
I think ( and I absolutely don’t know the answer) the question is when does it have commercial value - if I am sent to the foreign country by a magazine or newspaper to take photos to illustrate a story , then I’m obviously working in the foreign country. If I’m hired to attend and photograph an event in a foreign country , then I’m obviously working. But if there are no advance arrangements , when do I know if the photos have any commercial value? And do they have that value before I know it? I had a friend years ago who was an amateur photographer . And he sold some of his photos to newspapers and stock photography companies . But he never knew if he would be able to sell a photo until he did.
I wouldn’t be surprised if such work visa rules related to photography were put in place just to intimidate freelance journalists. There are lots of places where photographing things unfavorable to the image of a host country might get your equipment confiscated and yourself deported (or worse).
Oh I agree, first time around. But if you then sell your work to Getty, and then start planning your holidays around scenic locations you can make more money off (something an old colleague used to do), then you better believe you’re working!
I had to research this when travelling to Spain from the UK, mostly for personal reasons, but with the full intention of recording some video footage which I would publish back home (for profit) - this did not qualify (in this specific context, YMMV) as foreign employment. If I had been commissioned by, or sold the footage to a Spanish company, it might, but just taking photos and videos abroad for freelance commercial use back home, did not.
And of course countries can change their visa requirements on a whim. I traveled to India for work in 2010. At that time all I needed for a work related trip lasting a couple weeks was what India called a “business visa”. Then in 2013 my employer wanted me to go there again (That trip ultimately didn’t happen for budgetary reasons, but I started the visa application process). From what I gathered from the person over there helping with my application, for that trip, doing the exact same work, a business visa was no longer sufficient. If I was going to touch a keyboard at all I now needed a full blown work visa.
An aside: we had friends who, with their son, at one point in their lives decided to go live in France for a year. It was a bureaucratic nightmare, made worse by the fact that everything HAD to be in French, so required the services of a bilingual lawyer, etc.
As for working in a foreign country, it has tax implications for the IRS, but it’s mostly a factor of having lived over there for a year. I did this at one point in my life and my income was tax-free for part of that time, even though I was working for an American company.
Taking the photographer example one step further, what about professional influencers who travel the world and post pictures and videos of their adventures with the intent of generating hits and ad revenue? Curious about that.
This modern era I’ll call “mass portable solo entrepreneurship / gigging” is going to present all sorts of regulatory conundrums. Of which immigration status is but one. For sure the lead-footed nature of law will drag years or decades behind the nimbler reality of people hustling to make a buck.
That can’t be all that different from the ‘roving reporter’ roles in broadcast media
Conceptually, no it’s not. The difference is that the total number of roving international reporters in, say, the South of France in any given week might be 3. While the number of work-from-anywhere laptop jockeys and influencers traveling to pretty places in season to see & be posting about it might number in the thousands if not tens of thousands.
The former numbers can be ignored; the laws and the enforcers thereof need not perfectly capture every nuance of commercial possibility and every example of skirting beyond the rules.
The latter numbers, perhaps not so much. And multiply so once the word gets out (a specialty of e-communications in general and social media in particular) that anybody can do it and get away with it long-term.
That could be interesting, because there is always a proportion of wannabe/up and coming ‘influencer’ types that will be doing all the same things as the established influencers, just not with any profit yet - so there’s sort of a weird limbo between ‘working’ and ‘trying to find work’.
We had three young people in the last three years who were SHOCKED to discover that we were not prepared to let them work indefinitely from Canada, Croatia and Brazil, just because they wanted to and a few months of remote work had shown that they could effectively work from anywhere.
None of these folks had immigration or work visas. They said you don’t need a visa for these countries (I think technically you get a tourist or business visa on arrival) so they planned to just show up with a couple of suitcases start in an Airbnb-type place and then try to rent something more long term.
I’m not sure how different that is from any brick and mortar business that is laboring and spending while not yet generating much if any revenue. They’re working on perfecting their invention, or the factory to make it. Or they’re working on building up their clientele to break even, or whatever. But the intent is to grow the revenue to profitability or go broke trying.
Heck the whole and entire point of franchises is to make it easier for a wannabe, say, restauranteur, to open their doors and have an instant flow of customers. Open a franchise shop e.g Burger King and people will notice your familiar signs, know what you make and how you make it then come on in. Open your own great idea: Beastly Bob’s Bigly Burgers, and prepare to spend a lot of time in an empty shop before enough of the public dares to give you a try that you can pay your bills.
At least in the USA the legal line between a solo worker and a one-person business is very faint. The line from one-person business up to about 10-employee business is only slightly brighter & wider.
We had an American computer consultant who was coming to Canada to do some follow-up work for a project. He had forgotten to file the necessary paperwork, so he just told immigration that he was visiting to go fishing with Bob from our office. The RCMP came and picked him up the next morning. As I understood, he was put on a plane and he wasn’t coming back.
I do wonder if the key is “intent”. Ignoring photos, what if I visit wherever to absorb the atmosphere, then write a story, or a travelogue, food review, or what ever when I get home? Can a social influence no longer leave their country unless they promise to not mention their destination in their online postings? The line seems to become very fuzzy. What about the guy who moves to the south of France to write that great non-American novel?
As I understand, pro sports players, music stars, etc. have the reverse problem. There’s a whole industry in figuring out their income to be attributed to each country or state where they perform. I assume there’s a complex problem that applies to the roadies and other hired help who accompany them.