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by hahaiamatwork 5243 days ago
The logic behind unannounced seizures is valid. If announcement was given and MU were violating the law, it's reasonable to believe they would immediately take action to obfuscate and obscure any evidence against them. It is also likely there is little to no physical evidence against them, and as we all well know, electronic evidence can easily be disposed of without trail.

Corporations are not people, and by seizing assets and personnel the authorities have committed no murder. If anything MU has now become a household name and I find it very hard to believe their business would simply vanish overnight if acquitted.

1 comments

By the time these seizures occur, they have already collected all of the evidence they can from their public website, and there is nothing that would preclude the government from serving search warrants prior to serving notice of a domain seizure.

As to your comment about Corporations not being people...may I introduce you to Corporate Personhood. According to Wikipedia....

Corporate personhood is the status conferred upon corporations under the law, which allows corporations to have rights and responsibilities similar to those of a natural person.....

In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a headnote—not part of the opinion—the reporter noted that the Chief Justice began oral argument by stating, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

Yes, corporate personhood is a useful legal construct so that you can do business with a company, and not just a person within a company. It doesn't mean a corporation is a person who can be killed by bankruptcy or who can marry or vote.

If you sold 10,000 widgets to FooCorp you don't want FooCorp to claim your contract was really with one specific person within FooCorp that is no longer there. If they do something wrong, you want to be able to sue FooCorp and not its 67123 employees.