Vermont OKs the Creation of Virtual Corporations | Hacker News Reader

Vermont OKs the Creation of Virtual Corporations

gigaom.com

53 pointsKB10 comments

Less significant than it sounds (and certainly the title of the blog post is sort of linkbaity), but an encouraging sign nonetheless.

Not needing a physical presence is pretty cool. More of us are working out of our homes with teams that work all over the world. This could be really useful.

I'm curious how much you have to pay for it (initially, yearly, and based on revenues/profits).

I think most states have a yearly fee to be incorporated. They don't base it on revenues or profit because thats what taxes are for :)

Why "start filing virtual incorporation papers" instead of, oh I don't know, email filing or online filing? Seems odd to stick to paper.

Unless it's a figure of speech...

I wonder what new forms of white collar crime this might make possible...

If you write software that creates virtual corporations that cause harm that profits some other business entity you control can you be held liable?

Check out the book "Accelerando" by Charles Stross, he has a great section about sentient corporations. Free to download, even:

http://www.accelerando.org

On topic, this is really great news, the current regulations for this stuff is really archaic in an age where time zone matters more than country. Can't wait to find out some more, especially about upkeep fees.

edit: Scratch it, this is an amendment to the current LLC/corporation law, not an addition of a new class of company. Even cooler.

http://dotank.nyls.edu/june18virtualcorp.html

Accelerando had a lot of great ideas, including this one taken to its logical extreme -- companies owned by companies whose directors are themselves python scripts. Didn't much like the story, but the ideas are lovely.

Near the end of the second link you provided, Johnson says that the new amendment prohibits transfer of interest, even say, to your next of kin. I suppose this will lead these firms to setup themselves to distribute nearly all of their revenue to their partners, rather than maintaining large excess capital beyond that needed for, say, foreseeable upkeep.

...which is sort of incredibly cool, if you take the view that diminishing energy supply means the economy will only sustain itself by focusing off expansion and onto efficiency and paradigm revolutions.

So some of the lawyers I talked to said were leery of LLC's because they weren't proven in court as corporations are. So what are they going to think of virtual corps? This is really interesting stuff though.

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