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Does A Company Deserve the Same Privacy Rights As You?
An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an important case to determine whether or not AT&T deserves 'personal privacy' rights. The company claimed that the FCC should not be allowed to distribute (under a Freedom of Information Act request) data it had collected concerning possible fraud and overbilling related to the e-rate program. The FCC argued that the information should be made public and that companies had no individual right to 'personal privacy,' the way individuals do. As it stands right now, the appeals court found that companies like AT&T do deserve personal privacy rights, and now the Supreme Court will take up that question as well. Given the results of earlier 'corporation rights' cases, such as Citizens United, at some point you wonder if the Supreme Court will also give companies the right to vote directly."
If this comes to pass, then corporations will soon have more rights than people do. I'd expect to see a whole lot of real estate transactions in Delaware, and a lot more corporations being set up as people incorporate themselves to enjoy everything the government has been doing for corporations lately.
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When it can die like I can. When it can be taken off the streets indefinitely for doing harm to other people, the way I can.
Same goes for free speech in my opinion.
As a public company, this is clearly material information that needs to be disclosed to all shareholders (current and potential). Once you start trading stock, your corporate right to privacy pretty much disappears, at least where possible criminal activity is concerned.
Rights exist or don't exist. Once you start to use the term "Do X deserve the right to Y?" you have already lost.
Recently on August 23rd this year, UNITED STATES v. HAVELOCK concluded that mailing threatening communications in violation of 18 U.S.C. 876(c), which makes it a felony to mail a communication addressed to any other person, does not apply to companies and corporations like news organizations. So since they are not persons, they should not be bound by personal privacy laws.
Rights are not privileges. Privileges might be deserved or not. Rights are not "deserved": they are an inalienable feature of a person. Whatever the "creator" is, the creator of actual people that endowed people with inalienable rights is not a person (nor a government), and does not create corporations. People and governments create corporations, which do not have inalienable anything. Corporations are put together and made, and they can be separated from anything that makes them. They have no rights, only privileges actually assigned to the people who are the executives of the corporation.
The entire notion that a corporation is a person is a legal fraud originally perpetrated as a scam by a railroad monopoly. It's only though relentless corporate interference with the law in the US that corporations are treated as "persons" in any way. This fundamental injustice is the deepest flaw in our current democratic republic, and the source of the majority of our hardest to solve problems.
As for privacy, the US government already fails to protect the privacy of actual people according to the enumeration in the Fourth Amendment: "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects". Somehow Supreme Court justices can read that specification and not recognize the right to privacy it not only recognizes, but actually enumerates. To protect the privacy of corporations as a matter of "right" would pervert the fundamental basis of the US government beyond any ability to take it seriously except as a public office of private corporate power.
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The employees *inside* the corporation have the right to vote, speak, hire lobbyists, et cetera but the corporation itself has no more rights than a building.
The participants in a corporation are shielded for the most part from personal liability. That's the secret sauce that makes corporations so desirable; the people who form a company can pool their money and the entity is held responsible for the activities they collectively engage in, rather than the individuals involved. This is a great incentive for generating entrepreneurial activity, but it also means that the corporation has a legal life of its own, separate from even the founding individuals, much less people who were brought aboard long after the founders died.
The people inside the corporation spend money on lobbyists, PR campaigns, PACs, and so on, but they are merely the servants of the corporation. When Altria spends millions on local, state, and federal elections every year, it's not because J. Worthington Snipe, the guy who runs their Dirty Tricks Division, is exercising his rights as an individual. It's because Altria is taking advantage of its legal right to free speech, as defined by a series of Supreme Court decisions that completely ignore the fact that voting rights only matter if they are not completely overpowered by the 1st Amendment rights of goliath corporations.
The fact that corporations are legal fictions in no way diminishes the fact that they have been given many rights we would otherwise associate only with human beings.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
But corporations *ARE* people in the eyes of law. Even though it wasn't a precedent that was argued in a case (it was a footnote in a case added by a clerk, actually) it is accepted by the courts as precedent, which is what the recent election law ruling saying corporations can spend unlimited money was all about.
Knownothings call for constitutional amendments for stuff like taking away gay rights all the time... why does no one call for a constitutional amendment to REVERSE corporate personhood? It is probably one of the most important constitutional issues of our time and no one talks about it.
And we talk about "strict consitutionists..." When you do the research, there is plenty of evidence that the framers of the constitution did not believe in corporate rights in ANY way. They were VERY sceptical of corporate rights because of their dealings with the East India Company.
We are living through the looking glass when it comes to these issues today. Watch how this goes... people that are for corps. spending as much money as they want in elections say it makes things transparent... but give corporations privacy rights and all of a sudden they can spend all they want on any candidates and don't have disclose what they spend to anyone... and the corporations get even more rights!
A corporation is not a natural person, it is a fictitious entity, and so by definition has no privacy to protect. Each individual can protect their individual privacy. The individuals can band together into an association and protect their freedom of association (to some degree).
A corporation has trade secrets, which it protects as a proxy for the interests of the shareholders. There is already legislation and case law protecting trade secrets. A court should not confuse trade secrets with personal privacy.
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