alt Hacker NewsFor 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!"
Replies
> 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.
> 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.
Well I guess the idea of incorporation is wrong then. Execs and major shareholder should absolutely be held personally held liable.
> 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?