House lawmakers passed a bill today to overhaul the U.S. patent system for the first time in nearly 60 years, Nathan Koppel notes on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog: The House passed the America Invents Act on a 407 to 117 vote, WSJ reports.  The bill would change how the U.S. grants patents and award them to the party which is “first to file” an invention instead of the “first to invent” it. The change wo ...

David Wanetick, Managing Director at IncreMental Advantage, LLC, a valuation firm with expertise in valuing intangible assets and emerging technologies, based in Princeton, NJ,  opines at The Business Insider: Valuing a patent is complex and imperfect. Below we’ll go into some detail surrounding the methods used to determine a patent’s value. Each is applied under different circumstances, and impacted by ma ...

Who Is the Mystery Hamptons Moneybags? asks the New York Times DealBook. The hunt is on for the New York mogul with questionable cash management skills. Speculation bubbled on Wednesday after a receipt left hanging out of a Capital One ATM in East Hampton that displayed its owner’s remaining balance as $99,864,731.94 — yes, that would be $99 million and change — was posted on Dealbreaker. The receipt, which ...

The Accountable Care Fiasco That's what the Wall Street Journal calls the state of developing real-world guidelines for "the Accountable Care Organizations that are supposed to be the crown jewel of cost-saving reform." The theory for ACOs, as they're known, is that hospitals, primary-care doctors and specialists will work more efficiently in teams, like at the Mayo Clinic and other top U.S. hospitals. ACOs ...

Lawyers and Accountants Once Put Integrity First So asserts Mark W. Everson, commissioner of the IRS from 2003 to 2007, in an opinion piece for the Sunday NY Times: Three or four decades ago, investors and regulators could rely on these professionals to provide a check on corporate risk-taking. But over time, attorneys and auditors came to see their practices not as independent firms that strengthen the int ...

No Parties After IFRS Adoption in Canada When measuring the costs of IFRS implementation, there are the not-at-all trivial costs of changing accounting methods.  But there are also opportunity costs of spending time becoming IFRS compliant that you could have spent doing something other things. "The greater cost has really been the diversion of intellectual capital during this time period from doing more pr ...

SEC Wakes Up to Reverse Merger Companies Weeks after several Chinese reverse-merger companies have stopped trading in the US amid widespread fraud allegations, the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a warning that, hey, maybe investors ought to think twice about those reverse-merger companies.  Okey doke!  Mark Gongloff relays from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.  The Securities and Exchange Co ...

Forbes reports:  In the last (pre-drinking) session at the D: All Things Digital conference at the Terranea resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on Wednesday, we heard from  Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and founder of Netscape and various other tech start-ups. Chatting him up: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the session: Marc ...

More Feedback: Editor: I read the May 2011 QuickRead – “Tips for Valuators” concerning stub years. I have run into this issue several times and I have seen it misapplied many times and I am glad you wrote about the topic. I noticed two points in the article that I believe need further clarification. The first thing that I noticed in the article is that the PV factors need to be modified as well if you are d ...