Is this controversial? Executives should be held liable, certainly moreso than just regular people sharing files.

For better or for worse, the idea behind incorporation is that you, as an owner of part or all of the company, are separated from it financially and legally in most circumstances.

Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did. So if there were to be a consequence, Meta would pay out the fine. Not sure how you jail a company.

Now, in a company with a real corporate governance structure, the board would look at the loss incurred by said fine, look at Zuckerberg, and immediately fire him for causing the loss. However, like I said before, Zuck's in charge of Meta, so that's not going to happen, and the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares, which are the main repository of his wealth. So if he thinks he can make himself richer violating copyright law in the future, he will likely direct Meta to do so.

TL;DR, in the famous words of Bender from Futurama, "Hooray, the system fails again!"

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Telaneo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did.

I'm still stuck on how Z telling Meta (or the relevant people at Meta, whatever) to go out there and do illegal shit doesn't make a court say that he's functionally done said illegal shit, or at least encouraged the company to do, and that he should thus be liable for that. It's not like there's much plausible deniability here. It'd be one thing if the lower ranks thought it'd be fine and did it of their own accord. It's quite another for Z to tell people to go nuts doing illegal shit.

The DMCA makes facilitation of copyright infringement illegal. Telling people to do copyright infringement is surely facilitation of copyright infringement. Surely then, Z having broken the DMCA is a fairly open and shut case, modulo calculating the damages. But apparently not?

	▲	lenerdenator an hour ago \| parent [-]
		So, I'm not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV. I wonder if, somehow, you could use or extend RICO statutes to cover this sort of thing.

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triceratops 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Not sure how you jail a company.

> the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares

You lack imagination :-) but you've identified both the problem and the solution.

	▲	gizajob 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’ve sometimes pondered this about the legal personhood of a company - it has most of the rights as a human being but can’t suffer any of the major consequences, such as jail. It could be possible to construct a legalistic jail for a company whereby if it has committed the type of crime that a human could be jailed for, then it could be frozen for the duration, say ten years, and all its assets, shareholder funds, contracts, everything were frozen and impounded. Of course this seems completely ludicrous because it’s so “out there” but it’s worth having the thought experiment. Things like “corporate manslaughter” really have few consequences for the corporation itself - if it was actually jailed for twenty years and shareholders and officers left frozen out and on pause, then it might be the kind of punishment that really counted for something.

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esseph 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Not sure how you jail a company.

You jail the CEO and the others will stand up and take note.

"But they'll complain" who gives a fuck.

	▲	lenerdenator an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In this case, they'll be right. That, again, is the purpose of incorporation. It's also the same concept that keeps someone from emptying out all of your personal bank accounts if your small business gets sued. What you'd need is something that either removes that protection past a certain amount of value, or, to tell entities like Meta - which are basically sole proprietorships with window dressing - that they're not entitled to the protection of incorporation if they don't enact a real corporate governance model.

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ginko 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well I guess the idea of incorporation is wrong then. Execs and major shareholder should absolutely be held personally held liable.