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Archive for January, 2010

The Different Types of Tax Law Attorneys

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Many people are looking for tax help, as tax breaks, new tax laws, deductions and so on are common concerns. There are lots of methods to proceed in finding a great tax attorney. If you’ve come to the conclusion that you need a tax law attorney to help with your current tax problems or for tax advice, then you’ll want to know what kind of tax law attorney you need.

The fact is that tax attorneys come in different shapes and sizes, and they also come with a range of skills and expertise. Choosing the right kind of tax law attorney to handle your case is important so you can not only save time and money but you can also have the peace of mind of knowing that you have chosen the best tax law attorney to represent you. In order to know the different types of tax law attorneys, you have to know the different types of taxation laws and tax problems and then find the tax law attorney with the greatest amount of knowledge, experience, and expertise in that particular field.

First of all there is the tax planning attorney. A tax planning attorney is an IRS tax law attorney that specializes in tax planning and will assist in reviewing and structuring your financial affairs in order to prevent the IRS from troubling you. Then there’s the tax controversy attorney. Such a tax law attorney is needed if you already have a pending case filed in court because this type of tax law attorney is experienced in the courtroom and he or she is used to defending clients.

The property tax law attorney is an attorney with expertise in property tax, and they are the ones to look for when you wish to renegotiate your property taxeswith the IRS and ensure that you are paying the right amount. The bankruptcy tax law attorney specializes in handling bankruptcy cases. These types of attorney’s help their clients file for bankruptcy and ensure that all the information their clients provide about their finances is accurate and valid in order to achieve a positive outcome.

What You Need to Know About Intellectual Property

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Intellectual property (IP) is a catch-all term that covers creations of the mind, or intellect, that are both commercial and artistic in nature. Under intellectual property law, you are granted sole possession rights for a certain, predefined period of time. Depending on the type of intellectual property in question, this length of time may vary.

There are two categories of such property, the first of which includes creative works such as books, movies, music, paintings, photographs and software. These are covered by copyright laws, which offer copyright holders the exclusive right to control the adaptation or replication of the works for a certain statutory period of time.

The second category, known as “industrial properties,” includes those things created for industrial or commercial uses. Patents give the inventor and/or patent holder the right to stop others from using the invention unless they pay a license fee (again, for a certain period of time). Trademarks, also a kind of industrial property, are distinctive signs that reduce the confusion among similar kinds of products.

“Intellectual property rights” includes, as a subset, industrial design rights, and these protect the particular appearance, design, form, style or design of industrial object from various kinds of infringement, such as being cloned, copied or counterfeited. Another type of intellectual property is a trade secret, meaning proprietary, normally confidential information about the commercial products or practices of a business. Disclosing trade secrets to the public without permission is illegal in most jurisdictions.

A short history lesson
If creators of intellectual property were not protected, they would have little incentive to continue researching and developing products for public use, and would tend to keep things secret. Therefore, economic growth in the industrialized nations is, to a large extent, dependent on the protections afforded inventors, writers and artists by IP laws.In point of fact, intellectual property rights are really a simple form of temporary monopoly that is enforced by the government, and subject to the legal proceedings of that government’s judicial system. The more mature and ingrained this outlook is in a nation and economy, the better.

Types of goods
Rights in intellectual property are normally limited to what are called “non-rival” goods, meaning goods that are used by a number of people at the same time, where use by one person neither prevents nor excludes use by someone else. On the other hand, “rival” goods, such as clothing, are used by just one person at a time. By way of analogy, any number of people can use a math formula or a cake recipe simultaneously. This explains some of the objections to the term “intellectual property,” as some legal experts assert that the term “property” can only be applied to rival goods, or that it is not possible to “own” property of any other kind.

Because “non-rival” goods can be copied, for instance, by many people at the same time – in economic terms, “produced at zero marginal cost” – creators have no incentive at all to develop such works. Of course, monopolies also have their own inefficiencies, as some producers will raise prices and reduce production in ways that are not “maximized” for social benefit.

The intellectual property rights system, then, is best thought of as a trade-off, one meant to balance societal interests with monopoly power in the creation of non-rival good. In other words, the developing IP structures encourage research, development and creation of new things, new products, new ideas, and new processes.