[avaer]

Hm, is this an officially licensed HBO marketing stunt? Or does SeeFood Technologies Inc. actually exist as a corporation?

If not, I'm curious what the legal ramifications are of doing business as a corporation that does not exist.

[throwaway76543]

The term you're looking for is "Fictitious Business Name," or "Trade Name."

Generally, the legal ramifications are a requirement to register the name and pay a small fee. In Santa Clara it costs $40 to register a fictitious business name with the county and the registration is good for five years: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rec/Fictitious%20Business%20Nam...

It's really not a big deal.

[avaer]

Thank you, that's a pleasant surprise! Cheap and painless enough that it makes me want to try my hand at an ARG with fake corporations.

[ryanbertrand]

I thought Apple does not allow DBA entities? Don't you need to have a DUNS number to create an account these days? (It's been two years since I made one)

[patio11]

I mean, run it by a lawyer if you're ever tempted to use this in a commercial fashion, but you'd generally get told by a lawyer "I've got an icky feeling about saying untrue things in a fashion which could possibly be described as touching interstate commerce, but there is a surprising amount of nuance in fiction and entertainment experiences."

Do I think SeeFood Technologies, Inc. is factually incorporated in a US state? No, I do not. I checked the four states it is most likely to be registered in (Delaware, California, Wyoming, and Nevada) and it isn't registered in any of them. Corporate registrations are a public record and trivially searchable; if I had access to Lexis-Nexis or similar I could probably run the search nationwide roughly as easily.

A sibling reply suggests that getting a Fictitious Name / DBA issued might be sufficient, but this would depend on the state/county/etc; some of them prevent folks from registering fictitious names with things which suggest actual corporations (like Inc.) or various things which the state wants to protect ("Bank", "Trust", "University", etc are common).

(DBAs are available like candy and might make a lot of sense if you've got e.g. an LLC which operates a product whose name is not the LLC's name, if for no other reason than "You'll possibly need this to convince your bank to let you deposit checks made out to $PRODUCT_NAME into $COMPANY, LLC's bank account.")

[iNeal]

I would guess HBO registered SeeFood Technologies Inc. as it definitely looks like an official stunt otherwise it might have been taken down by now. It's not uncommon for them to do this - see http://www.piedpiper.com/ and http://raviga.com/

[WorldMaker]

Also: http://hooli.xyz

[archon810]

https://twitter.com/SiliconHBO/status/864148390044618752

[netsharc]

Most movies say they are distributed/produced by a corporation that is specific to the movie (probably for Hollywood Accounting), so it's probably really easy for Hollywood to do this.

[fred256]

If you look further down, it actually says:

"Seller: Home Box Office Inc."