BarbriSFCourseDetails

Course Details

This CLE webinar will provide estate planners with a comprehensive guide to specific estate planning issues and legal considerations for copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property (IP) rights. The panel will discuss identifying IP in estate planning, valuation, drafting bequests of intellectual assets, assigning or transferring IP, post-death estate administration and handling disputes, and structuring trusts designed to hold literary works, artworks, and intangible IP rights.

Faculty

Description

Taxpayers who have significant self-generated intellectual property assets, such as copyrights to artistic or literary works, trademarks, service marks or patents, and other IP rights, face specific estate planning challenges in ensuring that ownership of these assets and their related income streams are passed for the benefit of family descendants or other designated beneficiaries. Planners serving these clients must understand the intersection of the Internal Revenue Code, the Copyright Act, and other applicable federal regulations in structuring estate and trust documents to efficiently transfer IP rights to beneficiaries.

Estate planners must ensure that IP rights are correctly registered, understand mechanisms to assign or transfer such rights, meet the criteria for the client to pass his/her rights on to others, and minimize disputes over IP in post-death administration. Additionally, planners must identify those assets and structure will documents and trusts to avoid unintended tax consequences.

Understanding valuation of future royalty streams from intellectual property is also a must for estate planners serving clients who have IP rights in their self-created assets. By utilizing LLCs or other incorporated vehicles, planners can minimize tax by documenting valuation discounts upon transfer of assets to these vehicles.

Listen as our experienced panel provides practical guidance on the unique challenges and benefits of structuring estate plans for intellectual property rights.

Outline

  1. Key issues when incorporating IP assets in estate planning
  2. Intersection of Internal Revenue Code and Copyright Act
  3. Foreign considerations for copyrights held by estates and trusts
  4. Trademarks and service marks
  5. Patents
  6. Structuring trusts and LLCs

Benefits

The panel will review these and other key issues:

  • Types of assets and how to pass them down in light of current federal regulations
  • Structuring an LLC in conjunction with a trust to hold intellectual property assets
  • Best practices for utilizing valuation discounts
  • License vs. sale and valuation considerations