OECD BEPS from an IP Management Perspective

OECD BEPS has been described as “the most significant re-write of international tax rules in a century”. The essence of OECD BEPS is the switch away from a focus on the legal ownership of the intangible assets (like patents, trademarks, trade secrets, etc.) within a corporate group to a focus on the economic ownership and usage of these intangible assets by the group members. This switch I suggest will have a major impact on IP management and the associated IP policies, IP processes, IP systems, IP data, IP governance, etc. within organizations. These OECD BEPS guidelines are not just about tax, they can be seen as an IP management handbook, dictating how companies should behave when managing their intangible assets

Contemporary International Environmental Law: The Precautionary Principle and Reversal of the Burden of Proof

Assessing the burden of proof concerning the safety of human activities for both health and the environment presents a nuanced and intricate challenge. This paper delves into the evolving standards of burden of proof, examining the application and consequences within international environmental law. It addresses the issue of the allocation of the burden of proving harmlessness between developers and those impacted by activities. Employing a doctrinal research approach, this paper observes a shift in the allocation of the burden of proof in contemporary international environmental law. The paper synopsises that debate over the burden of proof is primarily bifurcated into two perspectives: traditional or treaty and judicial or contemporary approaches. The former posits that the responsibility to prove harmlessness rests with the developer be it private entities or the state to ensure that activities conducted within their jurisdiction do not harm the environment. Conversely, the latter marks a shift where opponents of an activity bear the obligation to furnish evidence of the harmful implications of an activity to be halted

CASE NOTE – Freedom From Religion – American Legion, et al v American Humanist Association, et al 588 US (2019)

The case note, Freedom from Religion: American Legion, et al. v. American Humanist Association, et al. by Stephen Pitt-Walker, critiques the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision that upheld the presence of a Latin cross war memorial on public land, arguing it undermines the First Amendment’s establishment clause. The case revolved around whether the display of a religious symbol on government property violated the principle of government neutrality toward religion. The Court’s majority justified its decision through a “contextual historical justification,” framing the cross as a secular symbol of World War I remembrance rather than a Christian emblem. Pitt-Walker contends that this reasoning abandons the long-established “neutrality principle,” which had guided previous court rulings to ensure governmental impartiality in religious matters. He argues that the decision unfairly favours the Christian (cultural) majority, discriminating against religious minorities and non-religious groups, ultimately eroding pluralistic values. The dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is discussed extensively, as she criticized the Court’s departure from neutrality and warned of the discriminatory consequences. The case note locates the case within broader legal and philosophical frameworks, particularly exploring the tensions between rights theory and utilitarianism. Pitt-Walker proposes that the decision represents a form of “tyranny of the majority,” where the rights of minority groups are overshadowed by majoritarian interests. He concludes that the ruling sets a troubling precedent for future interpretations of the establishment clause, weakening constitutional protections for religious freedom in the U.S

Suicide: The Scope of the Investigation in the Coroner’s Court

There has been public concern that some suicides are not investigated to identify causes or triggers, unless required by the European Convention on Human Rights. The paper reviews the statute and case law governing the decision of the Coroner as to the scope of investigation into suicide. The role of the Coroner in assessing public interest is discussed. There is particular reference to allegations of bullying. The science of suicide and bullying is reviewed and their impact on how an inquest is held is considered. Drawing together the science and caselaw, a framework is proposed for judicial decision making

Incarcerated Women’s Right to Health: Bridging the Gap Between Policy and Reality

This article aims to investigate the impact of incarceration on women with regard to their right to health in the criminal justice system in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Despite the universal recognition of the right to health within detention facilities, it has received limited scholarly attention. There is a pressing need for research on this topic due to the identified gap in the literature concerning incarcerated women, with the available data being fragmented and insufficient in addressing the women offender’s right to health in detention settings in the region. The findings of this article indicate that the use of detention facilities as a punitive measure has a significant detrimental impact on women, resulting in additional challenges within these environments. This results in gender-based disparities and differential inequalities of treatment that are systematically imposed upon women within the prison and criminal justice systems. Despite this evidence, incarcerated women are marginalised in discussions related to criminal justice system treatment. A significant absence of concrete steps towards reforming the criminal justice system remains

In-Play Outcome Prediction of an Ongoing Basketball Game Using Machine Learning

Basketball is among the most popular sports in the world today. Leagues and tournaments are played in all regions of the world, for example, the NBA, EuroLeague etc. Because of huge interest in basketball, there is a sizable pool of followers who are interested in betting. We study the related problem of predicting the winner of an ongoing basketball game which revises as the match progresses (also referred to as in-play winner prediction by researchers). We propose a supervised machine learning framework for the in-play winner prediction problem in basketball which seems to be new in the literature. We also quantify the importance of various features in arriving at the predictions using explainable machine learning techniques. Specifically, we use the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) framework. We evaluate our approach on a dataset of regular season NBA games from 8 seasons (2015–16 to 2022–23 season). Our framework achieves the best overall prediction accuracy of about 74% over all states of the game, and the best in-play prediction accuracy ranging from about 63% to about 90% depending on the state of the game. SHAP scores reveal that different classification algorithms learn to predict differently. That is, feature importance (i) depends on different classification algorithms, and (ii) varies with time

In the Money: An Analysis of Monetary Value of Chips and Player Outcomes in No Limit Texas Hold’em Poker Tournaments

This paper uses data from 25 World Series of Poker Circuit no-limit Texas Hold’em high-stakes multiday tournaments comprised of 17,852 entries to analyze changes in player rank outcomes based on chip stacks and prior-day rankings. High-stakes poker tournaments are comparatively expensive to enter and thus attract a higher percentage of skillful poker players. We find several interesting results. First, players that make it to the final table have 50% more chips than the average chip stack, after the first day of play. Players that finish in the money, but do not make it to the final table, have roughly the average chip stack and players that finish out of the money consistently have around half of day one’s average chip stack. We also found that for our sample, the players who made it to the final table were, on average, in the 70th percentile after day one. Only 48 out of 225 players (21.33%) came from the bottom half of the distribution after day one to the final nine players. We also evaluate the Independent Chip Model (ICM) and compare the results predicted by the model to the empirical results in our tournament data. We find that ICM does a fairly good job predicting overall results; however, players with the top 25% chip stacks on the final day of the tournament tend to moderately outperform their ICM expectations largely at the expense of the players with medium chip stacks. Shorter stacks, on the other hand, come closest to realizing their mathematical expectation

Exporting Environmental and Human Rights Abuses – Where Does Responsibility Lie

‘First world’ countries export their industries, manufacturing and production to ‘developing’ countries, thereby exporting their carbon emissions and other elements detrimental to biodiversity and the environment. Products manufactured for United States, United Kingdom and European Union corporations are produced in China, Bangladesh, India, Mexico and countries of Africa and, increasingly, South America. This creates low-paid jobs to the benefit of corporate profits, whilst increasing pollution and associated negative environmental consequences as well as exploiting labour and promoting human rights abuses. Countries such as the US export nuclear and chemical waste, too, transferring their blight to other parts of the globe. In the 1980s the US sought to export nuclear waste to Johnson Atoll in the Pacific, however, protest (principally from Australian activists) sought to put an end to this proposal, albeit chemical waste continues to afflict Johnson Atoll and the Pacific, it island nations people, flora, fauna and land. In the 2020s, the risks created by nuclear waste export are being multiplied with the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the UK and the US, including the prospect of US nuclear waste being disposed of in Central Australia where facility for storing the waste with any possible safety measures is lacking due to the nature of the terrain. In the 1970s, nuclear testing in the Pacific was banned when Australia went to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Now, the potential for and reality of environmental and human damage and degradation from the nuclear industry will be not on Australia’s doorstep, but effectively in the middle of the living room. What prospects are there for international law action in relation to the export of environmental damage and human rights abuse? What prospects for legal action to ensure that corporations exporting industry and outsourcing manufacturing and production contribute proportionately to environmental protections and an end to global warming and climate change? Furthermore, can legal action ensure the implementation of proper industrial conditions and payment for labour in countries taking on manufacture, production, outsourcing and supply of ‘first world’ goods

Evaluating the Efficiency of the National Football League Betting Market by Testing the Profitability of Suggested Gambling Rules

Gambling on professional sports is becoming more popular across the country as states legalize the practice, causing more participants to seek out profitable betting strategies. A number of academic papers over the past 40 years have found profitable gambling rules on National Football League games. We show that six of these supposedly profitable strategies identified previously in the literature fail to hold up over other time frames. The betting market in football is not inefficient with respect to the situations covered by these six strategies and the rules are not long-run profitable