When
you think about protecting company assets, several things probably come straight to mind, such as land, buildings, machinery, inventory and vehicles. In many instances companies overlook their intellectual property (IP), which can be one of their most valuable assets. By understanding the different types of intellectual property and how they can be protected against infringement you can help your business stay ahead of the competition.
Your business 'intellectual property' can include:
Working in the tax business is usually a pretty safe gig. You really just need an office, a computer with an internet connection, and a fast laser printer for all those piles of paper. There's not much heavy lifting — and even less intrigue or danger. But sometimes the tax business is a different story. Just ask Pavel Petrovich Ivlev, who works (now) in suburban New Jersey.
Pavel was born in 1970 just outside Moscow. He earned a law degree from Moscow State University in 1993, studied more in Amsterdam and London, then joined an international law firm. At that point, he appeared set to become another one of a new breed of Russian lawyers, helping newly-privatized companies negotiate the awkward transition to "real" capitalism.
Pavel's clients included Yukos Oil, and its charismatic chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky had started out collecting dues for the Communist Youth League. But as the Soviet Union collapsed, he rejected his old Leninist ideology. Taking advantage of glasnost and his party connections, he became an entrepreneur, published his own capitalist manifesto called The Man with the Ruble, and traded his way up to controlling 20% of Russia's lucrative oil production. For one brief shining moment, Khodorkovsky's $16 billion fortune made him the richest man in Russia and the 16th-richest man on earth.
Press
Baron Rupert Murdoch started with his father's newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, and built it into the world's second-biggest media empire. Time magazine has ranked him three times in their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Vanity Fair routinely lists him in their "New Establishment" ranking of the 100 most influential people of the information age. And Forbes ranks him as one of the wealthiest men in the world, with an estimated net worth of $7.6 billion.
But now Murdoch's News Corporation is in hot water because reporters at Britain's News of the World tabloid illegally hacked into telephone voicemails across Britain. Since the scandal came to a boil, several company officials have resigned, others have been arrested, and the News of the World — which began publishing in 1843 when Queen Victoria ruled Britannia — has shut down.
We're
all used to seeing the high and mighty brought down by taxes. Actor Wesley Snipes is currently sitting in federal prison for failing to pay tax on millions of dollars of movie income. Representative Charlie Rangel was censured by the House of Representatives, in part for failing to report $75,000 of rental income on his villa in the Dominican Republic. Even Florida mom Casey Anthony, on trial for the murder of her daughter Caylee, faces a $68,520 IRS lien, apparently for failure to pay tax on money paid by ABC for family photos and video. (Maybe she thought paying her lawyer was more important than paying her taxes?)
Would it surprise you, then, to learn that one of our highest-profile scoundrels is counting on the IRS to help get him out of trouble?
Paying on phony invoices is an occupational risk for small businesses. They are regularly the target of scammers hoping to take advantage of sloppy bookkeeping, inattention on the part of employees and poor communications between the people in the firm ordering goods, those receiving them and those approving payment. All too often they are paid unwittingly along with a number of other routine bills.
the use of computers becomes more built in to business operations employees naturally spend an increasing proportion of their time working at them. Working? Really? With temptations such as chat, streaming video, blogs, social networking and myriad other interesting sites (weather, maps, pornography, music, games, gambling, shopping, sports) it’s no wonder that surveys such as Websense’s annual Web@Work study reveal a depressing incidence of non-work related Web surfing by employees.