From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Jan. 16, 1988:

In Topeka, the House Taxation Committee this week began looking into the complicated issue of the assessment of sales tax on services. A bill, just introduced, would update the current definition of “sale” in state law to include the term “license to use.” “The purchase of canned software is a good example,” said Secretary of Revenue Harley Duncan. “Though we think of the purchase of the software as a sale, it commonly involves the receipt by the consumer of a license to use the particular program.” The definition of the term had been used as a defense for not collecting tax on some software sales. Duncan had proposed an amendment to the bill clarifying that receipts from mobile phone services and “beeper” services would be taxable. Opponents to the bill held that the Department of Revenue had been taxing services without legislative approval. T.C. Anderson,executive director of the Kansas Society of Certified Public Accountants, argued that the Department of Revenue had been assessing a sales tax on license-to-use agreements involving CPA firms for two years without legislative authority. He added that application software was intangible property and thus not subject to the personal property tax.