Monthly Archives: February 2012

Do you have to pay taxes on your online purchases? That can be a difficult question to answer. It depends on where you live and when you ask the question. The laws regarding online sales taxes change every year as states try to take their cut of the booming e-commerce trend. Over the past fifteen years, e-commerce has grown from literally nothing to a hundreds of billions of dollars a year industry. Its share of business is now near 10 percent of all retail sales. What we have now is a mix of laws governing whether states can collect taxes on internet sales; states also vary in how they collect those taxes. California has been one of the states trying to collect taxes on internet sales by requiring purchasers to pay 8.25 percent on things they buy online. Like many states, though, California’s approach so far has been voluntary tax…
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Posted in Business Litigation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Whether you are an artist yourself or your business has nothing to do with art, your website contains creative content that the law protects. This is because the words and images that appear on your site are unique, and anytime you create something, you are eligible for copyright protection. What is more difficult about protecting websites, however, is their digital nature. It is normally quite easy for others to take content directly from your site. While copyright law does protect your content, it is often easier to make the theft more difficult in the first place. Photos, for example, are a type of website content that others can usually take easily. If you created them, the copyright on them belongs to you, but fighting every internet user who tries to take a photo from your website is usually impractical. So, what can you do to prevent the theft of your…
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Do you design or dream up video game ideas on your own? If you are involved in any aspect of video game development, be sure to speak with an experienced intellectual property attorney before agreeing with a video game publisher to start moving your project forward. The relationship between a developer and publisher is similar to that between an author and a publisher, or a band and the band’s record label. The two sides work closely to get the best possible product to the public, but each side has its own objectives, which are often at odds with each other. The publisher’s aims are to decide which games should be made available to the public, how to market the game, what to revise if the publisher feels the game in its current form is inadequate, and what the product’s packaging should look like. A developer, on the other hand, should…
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Posted in Intellectual Property | Tagged , , | Leave a comment