If you owe a debt to someone else and they cancel or forgive that debt, the canceled amount may be taxable.

The Mortgage Debt Relief Act of 2007 generally allows taxpayers to exclude income from the discharge of debt on their principal residence. Debt reduced through mortgage restructuring, as well as mortgage debt forgiven in connection with a foreclosure, qualifies for the relief.

This provision applies to debt forgiven in calendar years 2007 through 2012. Up to $2 million of forgiven debt is eligible for this exclusion ($1 million if married filing separately). The exclusion does not apply if the discharge is due to services performed for the lender or any other reason not directly related to a decline in the home’s value or the taxpayer’s financial condition.

More information, including detailed examples can be found in Publication 4681, Canceled Debts, Foreclosures, Repossessions, and Abandonments. Also see IRS news release IR-2008-17.

Click here for the most commonly asked questions and answers about The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act and debt cancellation:

For those interested in redistricting information, here is a link to the NYS Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment.  You will be able to see the proposed lines for all the NYS Assembly and Senators.  The Congressional lines have not been released as of yet.

http://www.latfor.state.ny.us/maps/

Genius has launched something slightly unconventional – a battery-less mouse. No, it doesn’t use some kind of wireless power transfer to charge the mouse, but it does have a capacitor in place of a battery. Capacitors can hold some charge and Genius has one, that can stay charged through a day of use.

It should be selling in the U.S soon at a price of $39.99

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Image by 401K via Flickr

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On Tuesday, Google announced something called Search, plus Your World (SPYW). It marked a startling transformation of the company’s flagship product, Google Search, into an amplifier of social content. Google’s critics–as well as some folks generally well intentioned towards Google–have complained that the social content it amplifies is primarily Google’s own product, Google+. 

Read Steven Levy’s complete analysis of this latest Google move.

As we all know by now, Google is more than just a website or a search engine. It is truly an information giant with the rather immodest goal of cataloging and making accessible all of the information in the world. Many lawyers use several of the numerous Google services every day. Some lawyers run their entire law firms using Google Apps for Business, which for a reasonable fee provides 24-hour support and increased email security. When I am working on a joint paper with out-of-state colleagues, we almost always use Google Docs so all of us can access the same document, knowing that it is the latest version. (It is a bit strange at first to see someone else live editing the same document at the same time you are writing or editing.)So this month, we’ll look at some Google tips that are useful for lawyers.