Hacker News Reader

Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

limited liability corporations are the root of all evil.

without Limited Liability Companies, a civil matter as simple as a copyright lawsuit could permenently bankrupt a small business and take the owners house and all their assets.

I don't agree with companies wantonly externalizing their costs onto the environment or the populace such as Dow or 3M poisoning the entire planet. Criminal liability never goes away for serious crimes, whether sole-proprietership, LLC, or Corp. We need to actually start jailing people though

> copyright

Another thing we should flush down the drain to begin with

No flushing is necessary; it is conceptually fading on the internet whether the state acknowledges it or not.

It'll be great if some solemn elder-statesmen step up and read the writing on the wall instead of throwing more tantrums, but I think it's beyond obvious now that the internet will not abide copyright.

> could permenently bankrupt a small business and take the owners house and all their assets.

A small business, which practically is comprised of - in the US in most cases 1 employee, or maybe 1-3 employees, most likely related.

That person, who you say did a copyright issues, but maybe I say, accidentally used a chopsaw on someones hand... they're liable.

some fake paper does not reduce liability.

tort and copyright would be different if LLCs didn't exist

If you are a part owner of a restaurant that's an LLC, and the restaurant engages in wage theft, which is rampant in that business, in many states the corporate veil can be pierced to recover stolen wages. "Limited" doesn't mean "none."

no reason to have a veil at all. Delete!

Why do you want to arrest grandma for owning Enron stock?

I certainly do. The stock market would have fewer bubbles if risks were born by the owners!

if LLCs didn't exist, clearly the stock market would operate differently

would Enron have been Enron if it wasn't an LLC?

Enron (like all publicly traded US companies) was a C-Corp, but that's a technicality.

a c-corp is an llc

Clearly the system by which "grandma" owns a small part of a criminal organization is flawed.

Whether criminal liability needs to flow to individual owners I don't know, but I'm sure someone has done the thinking here about how to make this less insane.

Large shareholders are very different than grandma owning a few shares or even a few hundred shares. If criminal risk was priced into the stock, our society would look very different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com