How old am I?
I'm so old I remember when Google search provided more value than surveillance advertising.
I'm so old I remember when an operating system was not considered an advertising platform.
I'm so old I remember when "Artificial Intelligence" was a serious enquiry filled with brilliant people, and not a scam machine populated by sleazebags.
I'm so old I remember when "user" didn't mean "product".
I'm so old I remember when "corporation" didn't mean "person".
@dat @GeePawHill It's IMHO not even wrong in a legal sense, though arguably you could have better constructs. It allows distinction between natural and legal persons and both.
But the term confuses things, it makes it seem as if corporations have similar rights as people. Unfortunately, most alternative terms are more unwieldy.
Anyway... random thoughts without real conclusion on that topic.
@jens @dat @GeePawHill why would we need un-natural people? Can a legal but not natural person be punished, how would they be jailed? You can’t compel them with force ( the backstop to any authority) so you created a “person” that you can’t control. Every company should have one individual who owns it and is responsible for the actions of that company. If they break the law that person is responsible and takes the punishment.
@GeePawHill I distinctly remember someone telling me about this "Wikipedia" thing and me thinking it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of - who's going to write stuff for a free encyclopedia? And who the hell is going to use it? How could it ever grow to be a significant size?
Yeah OK I was just a teensy bit wrong about that.
@TomF @GeePawHill I remember when I first heard about Wikipedia, and I thought, "If this works out, printed encyclopædias are over." It did work out.
@passwordsarehard4 I get a lot of that, and some of what I am about to reply also could be handled differently and for good reasons. So keep in mind I'm not so much defending the current situation as explaining what problems it solves.
A lot of it is about property. Things can be easier if a a legal entity owns stuff, and people own (shares in) the legal entity. If a person joins or leaves the pool of owners, you don't have to re-divide legal ownership of every paperclip.
@passwordsarehard4 So you handle shares in the entity instead.
Such entities can have wildly different governance structures. But whatever that is, if an employee of the entity, in the course of their work, causes damage - should they be held responsible or the owners?
The easiest thing is to first hold the entity as a whole responsible, and deal with the damages. Then, depending on the severity of the damage, you can either still figure this out - or let the people...
@passwordsarehard4... contributing people figure it out between themselves. The thing it does is it allows milder forms of damage to be resolved faster, and that lessens the burden on the courts, which are paid for by the public.
Can such an entity be punished? Sure. It's happening a lot less than it should, but absolutely. The only trouble is, the punishment will be mostly financial. In some cases it may restrict their legal range of actions, which isn't the same as...
@passwordsarehard4... imprisonment, but also a limit on freedom.
Worst, you can dissolve such an entity, seize its assets, etc. That's a lot easier to argue for than a death sentence for the owners, but in the sense that it removes it from the world, it's equivalent.
The thing is, you can do these things without calling it a *person*, legal or otherwise. But in terms of how law addresses it, it's the same.
If you give such entities property (for reasons of making stuff..
@passwordsarehard4. .. easier), and you allow it to take responsibility and be punished, I do get that it should also have rights.
Again, though, the problem as I see it is confusing it for a person, and calling it that isn't really helping.
The abstractions above that make dealing with stuff easier *also* mean that it's often easier for the individual people *most* responsible in the org to avoid being held responsible. That's where I am also not content with this system.
@passwordsarehard4 And of course a lot of the lobbying for personhood of such things are directly traceable to this, to absolve the ones who most profit from it to be least responsible in practice.
That's where I understand your complaint well!