What you need to know about businesses with intellectual property.

In this episode of Coffee with Carl, attorney Carl Zoellner looks at how to approach intellectual property.

Got IP? 

No. 

I’m not talking about some computer hacker lingo, and while this may not apply to a lot of you, intellectual property is something that I get asked a lot about. 

If you have some intellectual property within your business or maybe you’re acquiring a business that has some valuable intellectual property, there’s a couple of ways we would suggest working with it. 

Firstly, we like to split out the valuable assets from the active business. This way we can use the same concept with intellectual property. If I have a valuable piece of IP, then I can actually split that out, and put it in a different business entity than my active business– leasing it, either back to myself or one of my entities or to outside third parties. 

A licensing agreement is also a great way from a tax perspective, to approach a new IP. In that, licensing agreements don’t come along with self-employment tax. Instead of having everything jammed into one business making it complex, or even potentially risking having something that could be treated as passive income as active income. 

When we start thinking about intellectual property, first consider splitting the valuable piece out of our business, which a lot of times is going to be that intellectual property. Also, if you get sued– what’s nice is that intellectual property should not become subject of that lawsuit. One thing I would say is if you are looking to start a trademark or copyright, you should reach out to an intellectual property attorney. It’s a specialty area and they can help you get that filed if appropriate to do so. 

The Takeaway

As always, keep taking advantage of our free educational opportunities and the free content that we put out on the web. 

Toby’s Tax Tuesday, and our tax and AP events are for our clients who’ve already gone through our Tax and Asset Protection event. 

Our Structure Implementation Series is fantastic. That answers a lot of the questions you have in the beginning. So a lot of different educational opportunities out there. One of my favorites as well is our Infinity Investing Workshop. 

Resources mentioned in this video:

• Join our next Tax & Asset Protection event to learn more advanced tax minimization & entity structuring strategies
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel to make sure you never miss the latest strategies & updates

Got an idea for a future Coffee with Carl? Send it to Carl at cwc@andersonadvisors.com.