Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
Maybe It will Happen this year and they won't need to change the law to create a $250 bill with Trump's likeness!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
My impression is the 10,000 subsidiaries would get one joint-vote. The charter has provisions for the case where a single voter is entitled to vote as both a resident and property owner (still only one vote) and where a voter owns multiple pieces of property (still only one vote). It is a little unclear to me what the legal arrangement looks like where a piece of real property has multiple owners but I suspect they would still only get one vote.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
It helps to read the decision. Relevant background:
In 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended the Charter of the Town of Fenwick Island ("Fenwick"), a small coastal community, to allow Fenwick to expand it's voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick. Today, the overwhelming majority of legal entity property owners in Fenwick registered to vote, and on whose behalf votes are cast, are trusts.
In this action the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, a corporation ("Plaintiff"), challenges these provisions, asserting that Fenwick's Charter violates the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution by way of "vote dilution;" i.e., the dilution of votes of human beings by votes of artificial legal entities.
The judge did not find some generalized right to vote for corporate entities. Rather:
1. In 2008 the Delaware legislature amended a town's charter to permit voting by certain corporate entities that owned property in that town.
2. The ACLU sued claiming the Delaware constitution only permitted natural persons to vote.
According to the judge's analysis:
1. The Delaware Constitution's Election Clause consists, in its entirety of "All elections shall be free and equal."
2. Who is eligible to vote in a municipal election is generally governed by a municipality's charter (under Delaware state law).
3. Permitting non-natural-person voters does not violated the text of the Election Clause in the Delaware Constitution.
Apparently, there are other municipalities in Delaware that have similar arrangements. The judge mentions the City of Wilmington explicitly. The judge only briefly mentions the corporate personhood thing since it's not essential to their analysis, but the ACLU argument relies heavily on it.
The question is less "do corporations have the right to vote?" and more "does the Delaware constitution forbid the Delaware legislature from giving corporations the power to vote in municipal elections?"
I have no love for the United States' copyright and IP regime but, as a developer of enterprise software myself, I have a lot of sympathy for the developers I suppose. Unless you have planned from the beginning for the idea that your game should be runnable without access to a server or that your server must be runnable on random consumer hardware I can see why it would be pretty difficult to backport that capability. Thinking in terms of my own product, you would need to replicate an extremely specific network and storage topology to get my software running and releasing a version of our software where you didn't have to do this might as well be asking us to rewrite the software from scratch. I don't know what the internals of various gaming company servers look like, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar. Especially in our modern era of cloud computing.
I am not sure this framing is quite correct. It sounds like Office 2019 for Mac shipped with a local certificate that does the verification of license keys. Microsoft has renewed that certificate but distributing the renewed certificate still requires an update to the software containing the certificate. Microsoft isn't releasing an update for Office 2019 since it has been out of support for 3 years. If they no longer have the source code this may be very difficult to do. They should not have made representations that it would work in perpetuity knowing this limitation.
I find it funny that this law seems like it could easily be more punitive to companies I think are much more pro-consumer than those that are anti-consumer, due to the subscription carve-out. Expect to see a bunch of companies add a $1/year subscription to their games to exempt themselves from California's law!
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