The transition from CCC to UCC with regard to royalties and license fees, and necessary consequences for the VAT-Directive

As the Union Customs Code will replace the Community Customs Code with effect from 1 May 2016, the thesis focuses on the new treatment of royalty payments for customs purposes and its legal consequences. In a first step, a comparison between the Community Customs Code and the Union Customs Code reveals that importers will have to face a significant increase in the customs liability of royalty payments. Secondly, with the European Union being a member of the World Trade Organization, it is investigated whether the topic-related provisions of the Union Customs Code comply with the provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. A survey of the advisory opinions and commentaries of the World Customs Organization indicates that the European customs law will follow the interpretation of the World Customs Organization to a great extent. Due to the fact that the taxable amount for import value added tax purposes corresponds with the customs value, the validity of this rule under the Union Customs Code is explored: an examination of the case law on the direct linkage between a supply and its consideration proves this rule as being justified. On the basis of these findings, then, the thesis discloses the considerable problem of double taxation of royalties and license fees in the case of taxable persons being exempt from the value added tax, as the royalty payment for the imported goods establishes a second taxable transaction, namely the supply of a service. Therefore, it is submitted to exclude the supply of services rendered in relation to the importation of goods from the taxable amount for import value added tax purposes

Modeling and Testing Implementations of Protocols with Complex Messages

This paper presents a new language called APSL for formally describing protocols to facilitate automated testing. Many real world communication protocols exchange messages whose structures are not trivial, e.g. they may consist of multiple and nested fields, some could be optional, and some may have values that depend on other fields. To properly test implementations of such a protocol, it is not sufficient to only explore different orders of sending and receiving messages. We also need to investigate if the implementation indeed produces correctly formatted messages, and if it responds correctly when it receives different variations of every message type. APSL's main contribution is its sublanguage that is expressive enough to describe complex message formats, both text-based and binary. As an example, this paper also presents a case study where APSL is used to model and test a subset of Courier IMAP email server

Constitutive modelling of polymer glasses : finite, nonlinear viscoelastic behaviour of polycarbonate

See PD

Continuum damage mechanics: combining thermodynamics with a thoughtful characterization of the microstructure

We formulate a macroscopic description of the mechanics of damaged materials. To represent the microstructure, the distribution of crack sizes is captured by way of the Minkowski functionals, or so-called quermass integrals, while a second-rank tensor is used to describe the average orientation of the cracks. A two phase-type approach is adopted to distinguish elastically strained material from unstrained regions in the wake of the cracks. Using nonequilibrium thermodynamic techniques, the driving force for the growth of the microcracks is naturally identified. In particular, Griffith's law is generalized to assemblies of polydisperse crack sizes. Due to the detailed characterization of the microstructure, we are also able to account for the plastic zones at the rims of the cracks that are known to hamper the crack growth, and to discuss possible forms of the damage parameter. The presented approach separates in a transparent fashion the incorporation of fundamental thermodynamic and mechanic principles on one hand, from the specification of the material and details of the crack formation and growth on the other han

Melt-spun poly(tetrafluoroethylene) fibers

The recent discovery of melt-processable poly(tetrafluoroethylene) (PTFE) allows for common thermoplastic-polymer processing technologies to be applied to this unique polymer, which heretofore was considered to be highly intractable. In this paper, we report simple melt-spinning of monofilaments of a set of melt-processable (modified) PTFE grades with weight-average molar masses (M w) ranging from 77 to 292kg/mol. Fibers were spun at 380°C at draw-down ratios of up to 2,750, yielding filaments of linear densities as low as 0.8tex, corresponding to a diameter of ∼20μm. The maximum Young's modulus and tensile strength of as-spun fibers produced in this study were 91.7cN/tex (1,972MPa) and 12.0cN/tex (258MPa), respectively, accompanied by a strain to break of 24

Het Bestuursverbod bij de Commanditaire Vennootschap

Het onderwerp van dit onderzoek is de in art. 20 lid 2 WvK opgenomen regel die het de commanditaire vennoot verbiedt de commanditaire vennootschap waarin hij deelneemt te besturen. Teneinde dit onderwerp enig reliëf te geven zal ik eerst in 1.1.2 in vogelvlucht ingaan op de specifieke kenmerken van de commanditaire vennootschap en de plaats die zij inneemt in het systeem van het Nederlandse vennootschapsrecht. Daarna zal ik in 1.1.3 aandacht besteden aan de doeleinden waarvoor de commanditaire vennootschap in de rechtspraktijk wordt ingezet. In 1.1.4 bespreek ik de bezwaren die in de huidige wettelijke regeling aan deze rechtsvorm zijn verbonden. Dat leidt tot een formulering van de onderzoeksvraag in 1.1.5 en een beschrijving van het belang van het onderzoek in 1.1.6. Als laatste bespreek ik in 1.1.7 het theoretisch kader van waaruit dit onderzoek is gedaan