Slashdot Mirror
Corporations Now Have a Right To "Personal Privacy"
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Thanks to a recent ruling (PDF) by the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, corporations now have a right to 'personal privacy,' due to the application of a carelessly worded definition in the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA exempts disclosure of certain records, but only if it 'could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.' But in its definitions, FOIA makes the mistake of broadly defining 'person' to include legal entities, like corporations. The FCC didn't think that 'personal privacy' could apply to a corporation, so they ignored AT&T's claim that releasing data from an investigation into how AT&T was overcharging certain customers would violate the corporation's privacy. The Third Circuit thought that the FCC's actions were contrary to what the law actually says. So now the FCC has to jump through more hoops to show that releasing data on their investigation into AT&T's overcharging is 'warranted' within the meaning of 5 USC 552(b)(7)(c) before it can release anything."
Nice work. Just so you know, when the revolution comes you'll be first against the wall.
At the rate this idiocy is going it won't be long until directors of failed corporations get charged with manslaughter or murder....
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I, for one, believe it is time for lesser minds to have some influence on the laws which are inflicted upon them.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Not to mention to shield investors from losing everything they own if the corporation fails ("corporate veil"). Without that proviso, our entire economic system would collapse (which I'll grant some people wouldn't have a problem with because they don't understand what life would be like then).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Think of it like a 10 million line codebase, with lots and lots of fragile code that uses the Person type. While reworking it to say "Legal Entity" and reserving "Person" for fleshy "Legal Entities" would be nice, it's a substantial undertaking. So instead you just say that non-fleshy legal entities count as Persons, and it all sort of works.
The government should not have the right to publish private information that they have seized just because it does not pertain to a natural person. What if they seize your customer records in the course of an investigation of one of your customers? Should your competitors be able to see those records just because you took the sensible precaution of incorporating your business?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Corporations might have a right to corporate privacy but not to personal privacy.
If they are people give them a right to vote. I mean by pencil, not by money ;-)
And jail them if they do something wrong and make them stop operating until they get out. Would they accept?
you can't "lockup" a corporation, but there is the corporate death penalty.
When was the last time you heard someone say we should revoke a corporate charter? With the bad corporate actors we have out there why isn't there more talk of this?
Check out this debate:
http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2009/9/17/125739/636
Corporations were given status of people in the 1800s with huge unintended consequences. And begs some interesting questions including free speech.
And taking it to extremes do they have the right to:
Keep and bear arms? Arm all their employees?
Freedom of religion? Would they be able to have symbol of that religion imposed on all US locations of their business? Have their employees follow some of the strictures of that religion, e.g. only bring kosher food to work?
Voting rights? Where? At all jurisdictions the company does business or only where headquarter or chartered? Who decides how the company votes? The board? The CEO? the stockholders?
Sotomayor wants to revisit this ruling, which is a very common sense thing to do, if you ask me.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Several people pointed out that you can "lock up" a corporation by dissolution/stopping if from doing business. This is unworkable for two reasons.
Firstly, if a corporation couldn't make a profit anymore then it would "un-incorporate" and possibly a new corporation with a different name and the same people would pop up. I have heard of this happening for smaller limited-liability corporations that specialized in government bid projects and were banned from bidding. They just started over with a new name. The government, local, state or federal, is so bureaucratically constrained that this seems to work most of the time.
Secondly, people are only starting to realize just how little power they have over corporations. I think the latest government bailouts prove that government is here to serve the corporations and they only make a show of punishing them to get reelected. Only the most egregious corporate wrongdoings have caused anyone to even go to jail.
My point was really to show how completely wrong it is to treat corporations as legal entities. The key to civilization working properly is to maintain personal responsibility. When a person's reputation is at stake they are more likely to do the right thing. Being able to hide behind people that have no real stake in the outcome of their decisions, other than being fired, has made our society what it is today.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
Most of those more innocuous uses of incorporation would not suffer in the least if the idea of 'personhood' were replaced with a very limited definition of the entity. They would suffer none from the institution of the "corporate death penalty" for acting against the public interest.
Alternatively, liability for individuals could be more appropriately limited so that incorporation becomes less necessary.
Another alternative would be to subject corporations to restrictions similar to those faced by individuals when in prison. For example by appointing DOJ monitors and requiring them to pare their expenses to bar minimum survival level and forcing them to operate as a non-profit. After serving their time they may operate for-profit again but will be overseen by a parole officer.
The founding fathers massively distrusted corporations due to their experience with the East India Company. The Boston Tea Party was as much a protest against the East India Company as it was the British Government (the East India Company was the proxy of the British Government in the colonies). They knew first hand the damage corporations could do and they believed the corporate charters should be handed out for limited periods of time with limited scope. We didn't have the immortal corporation in this country until the 19th century.
And there is no corporation today in the same relationship as the East India Company; even Halliburton, the closest analogy today, has nowhere near that level of power where they operate. But my overall point is this idea that we've moved from some egalitarian society to one where corporations control everything is just not true. Just like everything else in human history corporate dominance goes in cycles; it changes based on laws, the economy, demographics, and politics. If corporations had complete run of things half the laws wouldn't be on the books, including 95% of the Internal Revenue Code, ERISA, the Environmental Protection Act, and minimum wage laws. Slashdotters have to give up this simplistic, borderline-conspiracy-theory view of the world and start actually educating themselves. Corporations have too much power, I don't deny that. But they're not some unbeatable monolith crushing society.
To get there, you need an act of Congress, whose members are highly susceptible to lobbying by corporations. This has to be addressed by the Supreme Court, the same body who screwed this up a century ago. Thanks to Obama's recent appointment to the Court, this question is actually being raised, and there's at least one other Justice inclined to agree with her. Of course, they're still in the minority but it's unclear how the rest of them think, and even a strong minority opinion on this issue could be helpful in eventual change on this very important question.
Not entirely true.
While I've never killed anyone, I have managed to wreck company cars before, a couple of times.
The most recent was back in college, while delivering pizza for Round Table. I totaled their Yugo by rear-ending a one-ton pickup. Although the accident was my fault, since I was acting within the "scope of employment", I was not liable at all. Round Table paid 100% of the damages, the accident was put on their record and not on mine, raising their insurance rates and not mine. I was also not involved in the subsequent lawsuit, other than as a witness.
I was fired, of course, as is the general case when a delivery driver gets into any kind of accident, but that was completely company policy not legal liability.
Even though Round Table encourages their drivers to drive as fast as possible, even going so far as to keep maps of where police are likely to be, since such policies are unofficial, the owners and board of directors are also never responsible for the damages caused, only the company.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
There are ways to have the liability benefits of corporations without going the whole way; at least in Minnesota there are S-corporations. I'm a little fuzzy on the differences, but one of the main ones is that an S-corp is not publicly traded. That gives individuals and small groups the advantages they need.
There's no reasons why S-corps and regular corporations need to operate legally in the same way, although it's desirable to have a way of converting from S-corp to regular easily.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And the examples above were not likely anything the CEO was ever aware of
He would be aware of them if he were held accountable. Chances are he DOES know, but his "ignorance" gives him "plausable deniability".
Competence, incompetence, honesty, and dishonesty start at the top. The guy in charge is in charge. If he's not responsible, why is he making such obscenely huge sums of money?
Free Martian Whores!
Frankly, shouldnt that be how it works?
If you invest in a company that runs shit wild on the world with injustice.... you SHOULD pay for having bought into that company.
"Well I didnt approve of what the Nazis were doing, but... i was making a hell of a lot of money off it!... Oh no harm comes to me? WIN!"