Can college and university teachers take their course materials, presentations, notes, slides, PowerPoints, syllabi and other teaching resources with them when they leave their current positions?  Can they sell or license these materials to online universities or market them through Amazon?

For a group that tends to dispute everything even a position that would presumably only side in their own interest, academics too must conced the legal ambiguity of the copyright law’s “work for hire” doctrine when applied to the academic setting.  What probably not in dispute is, as one commentator describes it, that “Traditionally, it was presumed that educators owned copyrights to academic work they have authored or created.”

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LLCs vs S corps: Income and Tax Differences: These income and tax questions are frequently asked when individuals and partners contemplate forming a new company.  Basically, am I better off with an S-corp or an LLC?  There are several non-financial benefits (which I lean toward) in favor of the LLC over the S-corp, particularly the LLCs structural flexibility.  Many articles and blogs have been written about that subject and I will link to some of the good ones later.  For now, I wanted to address some of the more ambiguous questions about the two legal entities impacting the entity decision, namely whether the choice makes a basic tax difference for the principal owners.

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You sell your business for cash plus an amount to be determined based on earnings or other performance measurements of the business over the next 1, 2 or several years after the sale.  This is an “earnout” and can be a very lucrative upside to a seller.  It can also be attractive to a purchaser unable (or unwilling) to fully calculate the value of the business being purchased at the time of sale.

It also has obvious risks, particularly to a seller.  Commonly, the earnout involves a seller who will continue to participate in the business after the sale under some sort of employment or consulting arrangement with the new owners.  This theoretically gives a seller an ability to have some control over the post-closing success of the business, while giving the purchaser a way to incentivize (and control) the seller’s employment or consulting performance.

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