News, Views and Muse

New, free browser defeats country web censors

Denmark, The Netherlands, Iran, North Korea, Italy, the list of countries that censor the web is long. Pirate Bay is now offering a Web browser that can circumvent any censorship and Web blocks, according to PC Magazine. The PirateBrowser is available at www.piratebrowser.com.

How are third-party royalty agreements used to defend transfer pricing decisions?

Reebok India won its dispute with Indian authorities partially by presenting comparable third-party licenses that proved the 5% royalty it was being charged by Reebok UK (for knowhow) was consistent with rates in other agreements, supporting their claim the ‘negotiations” were “arm’s length.”

Borrowing against IP

Guangxi Zhuang is an autonomous region in China that acts very much like enterprise zones in the U.S. Officials want to attract the technology industry, and one way to do that has been to let small to mid-sized tech-companies use patents as bank loan collateral. The idea was to help small companies secure R&D funds; officials chose 11 patents out of 23 applications, and recommended them to local banks. Part of the process has been the creation of a new metric: currently the city has 1.15 patents for every 10,000 people. They are also planning to work on regulation for borrowing against patents.