[musingsole]

> I think you're inadvertently wandering into some really wonky territory.

Undoubtedly :P

As for crimes, I think the US legal system supports my view more than the one that clearly separates these employees from the MS entity. MS may fire the employees as a result of their actions, but up to a point, MS is fully liable for their actions as representatives of the company long before the employees are liable as individuals.

[breischl]

But just because you're an employee doesn't mean you have unlimited authority. Getting the janitor to sign a billion dollar contract doesn't mean that Microsoft has agreed to it. The new-hire intern can't go on the news and make binding promises about corporate strategy.

It sounds like these employees used the printing presses in unauthorized ways, put unauthorized products on the shelves, and probably even used trademarks and whatnot without authorization. The properly-authorized managers of the company would be within their rights to disavow them, or maaaaaybe even prosecute for misusing resources.

I realize I've massively over-analyzed this, and MS would've been huge assholes to prosecute over this. But I think they legally would've been able to.

[musingsole]

>used the printing presses in unauthorized ways

Who gets to authorize what? <- That's largely my point in all this. We can joke about Bill Gates' specific view on the incident. And we know its relevant because (at least at the time) he was a majority shareholder. So we know his opinion would've been closely correlated with the entity Microsoft's opinion. But MS isn't Bill Gates and his opinion would have just been one among many.

Presumably there's a document somewhere that can trace itself back to the first charter establishing 100% ownership of a corporate entity as held by one or a few who then (following the rules set in that charter and subsequent ones) built an organization known as Microsoft with many rules and stipulations to distribute and represent that ownership (all the while giving away pieces of it left and right).

The question of who is and isn't Microsoft strikes me as a Ship of Theseus problem. As for the answer to that problem: we have society's answer in its legal precedents even if they're ever moving and then we have another nuanced interpretation for every human on the planet who bothers to think about it.