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Supreme Court Rules On Corporate Privacy
heptapod writes "The Supreme Court unanimously decided (PDF) Monday that AT&T can't keep embarrassing corporate information that it submits to the government out of public view; 'personal privacy' rights do not apply to corporations. 'We trust that AT&T will not take it personally,' concluded the ruling."
we still have quite a few other personal rights that have been given to corporations that shouldn't have
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Finally, some common sense. Now if only they would have done the same in previous cases.
About frakking time. Corporations should have no more access to human rights than a tree or rock or building. If an entity can not vote, then it should not have rights.
Privileges like trademarks and advertising? Sure. But such privileges should be strictly regulated and limited (unlike individual speech rights which should be unlimited).
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
I think they just don't like the idea of not knowing what the companies in their stock portfolio are up too. Make no mistake, the Supreme Court is in it for the money
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Even with the deregulation, competitors still have to use AT&T copper to run their services. It's not like they're going anywhere.
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I am sure if you make some "donations", a bill will quickly be passed to change this ruling. I think bill's name will be the "Freedom Defense".
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
flying pigs
"We trust that AT&T will not take it personally" concluded the ruling.
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THAR!
First off: "We trust that AT&T will not take it personally"
Hahahaha! That's like a big middle finger stuck right into the ruling. Nice!
Now that I got that out of my system...the whole corporate personhood thing is such a farce anyway. A corporation is nothing but a group of people. It could be one person or 100,000 people. But if you remove all the people from the corporation, can it make a decision? Can it sign a piece of paper? Can it continue to function at all? NO.
What's worse: the idea that people do things "on behalf" of corporations. Such as the fallacy that a corporation is to blame and not the person who does the wrong thing and rationalizes "I'm not a sociopath because I decided to pollute that river with toxic waste then obstruct justice during the investigation by shredding all those documents on behalf of the corporation."
Corporations don't commit crimes. People do. Maybe it's "on behalf of" the corporation. But it's always a person doing the deed.
Again, a corporation is its people. It's not its own person.
What does that mean for our elections? Can Murray Hill Inc. still run for office? Can it still run, only without any personal privacy?
Thankfully, this dialing back corporate personhood and granting personal rights to corporations has long been overdue. Odd case to have it happen in, as the outcome is not clearly positive in all cases, but the overall result for the law in general is a positive one.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
If corporations were individuals they would be sociopaths as this 2003 Canadian documentary endeavors to show. In D&D they would be considered either lawful evil or chaotic evil (depending on the corporation). They are narrowly selfish and greedy to such an extent that as an individual they would almost certainly be criminals. Profit trumps every other concern without exception. So corporations are an evil institution, but are they a necessary evil? The price we pay for economic prosperity. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean we have to give them any more power than necessary to get what we (as a society) want from them (inexpensive, innovative, useful products).
I consider myself a Libertarian, but I would argue that even in a free society corporations-as-individuals should be prohibited. It simply does not make sense to grant them the same rights as an individual not only because they clearly are a group of individuals, but because corporations need to have limitations on their power and on their predictably ruthlessly selfish/evil behavior. Corporations are the only institutions that can even remotely compete with governments in terms of power and abuse of power and they should be treated warily because of this.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Folks here are already saying things about this ruling diminishing the "person" aspect of corporations. The ruling doesn't really do that. Instead, it rests on a question of statutory construction. In particular, the court says that "personal privacy", a phrase used in FOIA, does not merely mean the privacy of a person, as AT&T argued, but instead refers to particular elements of privacy that only carry meaning when you're talking about an actual human being.
we still have quite a few other personal rights that have been given to corporations that shouldn't have
I'll be glad when this fad goes away. The whole reason for corporate personhood is to protect the rights of the people involved with the corporation. If the US dismantled the corporate personhood machinery, it would have to be replaced with something else that does pretty much the same thing. Else groups of people would have their rights trampled. It's not rocket science.
Also, note that even moderately controversial decisions (such as the frequently reviled Citizens United v. FEC case) are decided by narrow majorities (5-4 decision in that case) while obvious stretches of corporate personhood are decided by 9-0 rejections. This isn't an area that is careening out of control.
Sadly, most elected officials do not realize, that we the People, ALLOW these businesses to do business in our country.
Just like they think they lead us, when the words lead, leader and leadership, do not exist in the U.S. Constitution.
The tail shall not wag the dog. End of story. Get out and vote against these idiots! It is your DUTY as an informed
electorate.
Apparently, these eight supreme court justices need to be taught a lesson.
Don't they know that the original intent of the framers of the Constitution was that corporations are persons, except when it comes to paying taxes? Also, union members are not persons.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The United States is founded on the basic legal philosophy that anything which is not illegal is allowed. That is also known as "Freedom". Corporations are just, at the end of the day, people working together to achieve a common good - stockholders, board members, executives, managers, and rank-and-file employees. People.
People have basic rights and freedoms which the government cannot allow them, but only take away from them. I personaly don't see why people working together should have less rights than people working alone.
Each individual in the group already has 100% of their rights as a person. Nothing is lost.
I personaly don't see why people working together should have less rights than people working alone.
Scale. Gangs of thieves also don't get to have 100,000 employees worldwide. You can put a whole gang of thieves in jail, effectively dissolving their "corporation."
Thief corporations can only be dissolved and jail pretty much avoided in the USA --look at Bernie Madoff's cover-up of his 'nonexistent' accomplices. A result is that the same 100,000 thieves will be out there doing other thieving and banding together after a PR rebranding effort.
The question is which 'status' would most people choose given a default 'evil' mentality?
Yes it is.
But a corporation doesn't live.
When a company is fined, who pays the price? For public companies (most of the companies we care about), the answer is basically shareholders -- almost all of whom had no part in the wrongdoing. So the main effect is that some people in the company do something wrong, then all shareholders get fined. I think more fines should be leveled on the people who actually did the wrongdoing (although fining the company is still somewhat useful as it does provide an incentive not to break the law -- it's just that the burden of the fine is mostly misplaced).
Corporations can lobby politicians, who ignore commoners. Money, power, fame are the only ways to get noticed by politicians. Corporations have all three.
And they really donate when the politicians are running for office.
wake up and hold your nose
The creation of the limited liability company was and is a scam to allow rich people to screw you and me without having to take responsibility for it.
The fewer 'rights' a corporation has the better so far as I am concerned.
Where can I get Supreme Court fan T-shirts?
Folks here are already saying things about this ruling diminishing the "person" aspect of corporations. The ruling doesn't really do that. Instead, it rests on a question of statutory construction. In particular, the court says that "personal privacy", a phrase used in FOIA, does not merely mean the privacy of a person, as AT&T argued, but instead refers to particular elements of privacy that only carry meaning when you're talking about an actual human being.
The most telling part is when Roberts points out that "personal" frequently refers to non-corporate, non-business, non-commercial activities: your personal expenses as opposed to your business expenses, personal deductions vs. business deductions, personal correspondence vs. business correspondence, etc. That doesn't say that a corporation may not have a right to "business privacy" (and they do, see trade secrets), but that "personal privacy" refers to a different animal.
Anyone know if this can have a residual effect on the way the WikiLeaks bank data might be handled when that goes public? Does this ruling give WikiLeaks a little more breathing room? And, for that matter, what about the HBGary data?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
....
Then corporations finagled life in perpetuity from governments, and the long slide into unchecked power began. In 1886, a landmark Supreme Court ruling deemed corporations "artificial persons" with nearly all the rights due a natural person. With that, they won the right to lobby the government and twist our system to their sociopathic ends.
Now here we are after more than 200 years of this experiment in democracy, watching corporations not only lie, cheat, steal, kill, and corrupt with impunity, but subvert our government so thoroughly that it no longer matters which political party holds power; and now they are preparing to sweep away the last vestigial check on their abuses by sidestepping public shareholders and stock markets in favor of private equity where they are beholden to no one but themselves and their buddies in other mega corporations.
The body politic must wake up soon and correct this, or we will definitely arrive at a very dark place as fast as unfettered avarice can take us. Stripping corporations of the right to lobby and live in perpetuity would be a very significant first step. Applying anti-trust legislation ("Trust" was the previous term for cartels and monopolies) to break up the "too big to fail" companies would be an excellent follow-up. But whatever is done, it must be across the board, with no loopholes, or we will find ourselves back in the same place in a fortnight.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Where can I get Supreme Court fan T-shirts?
China.
Seriously. I didn't find Supreme Court T-shirts in the few months I was there, but I did find Supreme Court hats. They have the words "Supreme Court" embroidered on them in flowing quasi-cursive like it was the name of the local minor league ball club.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2015772&cid=35358632
APK
P.S.=> ROTFLMAO! apk
This decision, unfortunately, did not limit the personhood of corporations. It just limited what "personal privacy" means, to exclude business dealings. This standard applies the same to natural persons as it does to corporations, but since corporations have only business dealings by definition, nothing they do falls under "personal privacy". What we really need is for corporations to be ruled non-persons when it comes to rights generally, and this decisions goes nowhere near even touching that issue.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2015772&cid=35358632
Why'd you run from discussing that troll? You sure "talk a big game" but when it came down to specifics?? YOU RAN!
(OR, didn't YOU troll ME, first, there?)
APK
P.S.=> You sure can "dish it out", but you cannot take it... and you RAN like the trolling beyotch you are... lol! apk
As Heinlein also pointed out in the series about the Howards -- long lives give inherent advantages, especially financially. People have to die at some point, but we don't now force corps to die (we did used to). That's the other major imbalance.
Third, and some tiny progress is being made here, is the corporate veil is all too difficult to penetrate. For example, the people who signed off on Sony's rootkit should face the same penalties I would if I did the same thing. SCO's executives should face jail for fraud. Things that get us regular humans into jail should also apply to corporate employees, period. At least we now make the CEO personally responsible for the financial reports he signs -- a tiny start, but a start.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
And what exactly changed for the better? Or for that matter, at all? Now the new clowns, in their vanity, claim a "mandate" when in truth all we were doing it picking the only other unacceptable choice off a very short multiple choice list. How many times (and years we can't get back) do we have to repeat the performance before the next batch of clowns "gets it". And how many times should it take, by rights? One? did that. Two? Did that too. In fact we've been doing it in most elections for my entire lifetime, and it's almost over for me, I ain't getting any younger -- are you? So get real about the ballot box helping anything at all. That's the bullshit cool-ade they got you drinking. I fell for it too, for about 40 years. I'm telling you from the other side, it's bullshit cool-ade and a flat out lie -- whether by design or accident doesn't matter.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
n/t
This is an Open ID test.
Hitting the shareholders' pocketbooks is what should motivate them to keep douchebags out of leadership positions in the company.
That can work (although it's harder to do than it should be), but it's mostly a second order effect; hit the shareholders who then hit the wrongdoers. Why not just hit the wrongdoers directly? That's almost guaranteed to be more effective. As mentioned before, it also has the advantage of not hitting the non-wrongdoers.
Hey! Can we PLEASE have a shipment of that non-corrupt good common sense over here in Oz! PLEEEEZE!
" We trust that AT&T will not take it personally." (Taken from page 12 of the PDF.)
What better way to stick it to AT&T than after telling them not to take it "personally" after telling them that the "personal privacy" they are requesting isn't valid.
While in fact the Supreme Court really isn't all that conservative, people simply declare that because the small (gettin' smaller all the time in fact ;) ) majority were nominated by Republican Presidents -- though I could also question just how "conservative" those Republican Presidents would be considered in this day and age of "the Constitution doesn't specifically have my name in it so I don't have to do anything I don't want!" thinking.
Now, up until this point, the right-wing has been getting everything they've wanted because up and until this point, the "Boundaries of Law" have been pushed by center-left causes by center-left (I refuse to call them liberals because, by my definition, they are VERY far away from "liberal" in their mindsets) politicians. Therefore the right has been able to count on the, in theory at least, center-right leaning court to keep the country in a right-leaning status.
But now we're starting to get into things that WERE considered center-right until the right-wing Republicans (not to be confused with sane Republicans) decided they could better get elected by turning tale and supporting the opposite simply to score cheap points.
Their decades old dependence on the Supreme Court to ultimately give them their way is quickly going to come to an end. Such as when the the center-left members of the Court, lead by Chief Justice John Roberts, form a majority opinion that the Healthcare Reform act is Constitutional -- heard it here first folks!
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
must say that overall I am really impressed with this blog.It is easy to see that you are passionate about your writing. If only I had your writing ability I look forward to more updates.
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