As a result of two rulings, each effective July 1, 2015, the city of Chicago will attempt to tax the “Cloud” more directly and comprehensibly than any other U.S. jurisdiction. On June 9, 2015, the Chicago Department of Finance (the “Department”) issued rulings regarding (1) the application of the city’s Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax (the “Lease Transaction Tax”) to nonpossessory computer leases and (2) the application of the city’s Amusement Tax (the “Amusement Tax”) […]
Law
5 posts
Like many of us of a certain vintage, Warren Wander owned a Sinclair ZX81, the forerunner of the ZX Spectrum, the first commercially available home computer. It is a measure of how far ahead of the curve its progenitor Sir Clive Sinclair was that the device was little more than a basic games machine, and barely a home computer at all. In 1982, it was like putting a Lamborghini in the wild west. No roads, […]
There is no shortage of hype about cloud services, both positive and negative, but it is often difficult for potential customers to do an objective cost / benefit analysis. In addition to promising productivity and business process benefits, cloud computing can be very attractive to cut rapidly both capital and operating expenditure. There may, however, be unanticipated costs and risks in a move to online hosting of key data and applications. Perhaps surprisingly, and despite […]
It’s hard to imagine, but roughly 10 years ago as VoIP was being rolled out corporate networkers were quite concerned about the security of VoIP. As we faced a move from voice going over a traditional (and, by the way, unencrypted) network, there was concern that VoIP would be much too easy to eavesdrop on – especially if it traversed the Internet. We’ll leave the question of whether “legal intercepts” as a political and civil […]
The benefits of cloud services are often cited. They’re low-cost. They’re scalable. They’re permanently state-of-the-art. However, at least with traditional IT outsourcing, the customer can negotiate a balanced, even a customer-friendly contract. Cloud customers usually have little option but to accept standard T&Cs. It is a utility model, where multiple users each buy a slice of the same pre-existing service. Providers tend to have the “take it or leave it” mentality of a gas or […]