Law Commons^™

America's (D)Evolving Childcare Tax Laws, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Articles

Proponents have touted the ability of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the TCJA) — enacted in the twilight of 2017 — to help American working families. But while the TCJA expanded some benefits available to parents with dependent children, these parental tax benefits may be claimed regardless of whether or to what extent childcare costs are incurred to work outside the home. To help working parents with these costs (which are often their largest expense), Congress might have turned to two other mechanisms in the tax law — the “child and dependent care credit” and the “dependent care exclusion.” …

Acquiring Innovation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

In recent years, the innovation market has witnessed a new business model involving companies that are mere patent holding shells and not operating entities. They have no customers or products to offer, but they do have an aggressive tactic of using patent portfolios to threaten other operating companies with potential infringement litigation. The strategy is executed with the end goal of extracting handsome settlements. Acquisitions of patents for offensive use have become a major concern to operating companies because such acquisitions pose the threats of patent injunction, interrupting the business and crippling further innovation.

While many operating companies today know …

Taxing The New Intellectual Property Right, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

Current, albeit arbitrary, rules exist governing the tax treatment of traditional forms of intellectual property, such as patents, trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, and trade names. While tax principles exist for these traditional intellectual property and intangible rights, specific tax rules do not exist for new intellectual property rights, such as domain names, that are emerging with the arrival of global electronic commerce transactions on the Internet. This article explores the proper tax treatment of domain name registration and acquisition costs, addressing these parallel questions? Are domain names merely variations of traditional forms of intellectual property and other intangible rights to …