The arithmetic is easy, it is the inputs that are difficult

Abstract

This section is dedicated to the review of ideas, articles, books, films and other media. It will include replies (and rejoinders) to articles, the evaluation of new ideas or proposals, and reviews of books and articles both directly and indirectly related to intellectual property law. Not having read the first edition of this book, this reviewer cannot comment on the updates and changes from the first edition beyond noting some more recent transactions. To a newcomer to the work, it makes a very straightforward, if rather long, exposition of the three main methods conventionally used for trade mark valuation: the ‘market’ method, the ‘income’ method and the (very rare, indeed) ‘cost’ method, breaking down these methods into their main components and providing standard mathematical formulae to support them. The work seeks to synthesize the legal, economic, accounting and financial background to valuation in one work. It is clearly not intended to be an academic work (as opposed to a business text) even if much of the work seems to be a distillation of earlier, more academic, work by the authors, referenced in passages of straightforward exposition of the mathematical methods used to value assets. This is not cutting-edge stuff and is not intended to be. The book is conservative in tone and relatively dismissive of the more adventurous ways of assessing value or ‘subjective methods’. Advice on which method or a variant to use when is minimal—probably deemed ‘advanced study’—and use of multiple methods is recommended to achieve a variety of valuations of the same asset, to sense-check each other.