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
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 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.
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.
