A corporation a person? -- can it be elected to public office? keep and bear arms? jailed? Executed? Retired at age 65? Be held for 72 hours for mental status evaluation when its behavior causes its sanity or judgment to be legally in question? Judged incompetent to handle its own affairs? Required to give a urine sample if a vehicle under its control is driven in an erratic manner? Bleed? Show a sense of humor? Pass a Turing Test?

"Why is it a privilege for a soldier to die for your country, but a burden for a corporation to pay taxes?"

The tale of corporate personhood is sordid and depressing: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030919.html

Unfortunitely Corperations are considered to have the same rights as any individual under the law.

Good work facing down the fascist though... keep it up.

While corps aren't *people*, I do believe they are treated as an *individual* in certain areas of law. But I ain't a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV. This is from lawinfo.com:

Corporation
A legal entity, allowed by legislation, which permits a group of people, as shareholders (for-profit companies) or members (non-profit companies), to create an organization, which can then focus on pursuing set objectives, and empowered with legal rights which are usually only reserved for individuals, such as to sue and be sued, own property, hire employees or loan and borrow money. Also known as a "company." The primary advantage of for profit corporations is that it provides its shareholders with a right to participate in the profits (by dividends) without any personal liability because the company absorbs the entire liability of the organization.

Remember the following mantras:

1) Corporations are not citizens.

2) Corporations have no rights.

3) Corporations deserve no rights, or protections.

4) Corporations have no right to make or enforce laws.

You've done good patriotic duty defending your country from the corporate enemy, in this case, American Express. Keep the above in mind, and you will never do disservice to your country.

Actually while I am in profound agreement with Mr. or Ms. American "Corporations" did manage to get themselves rights under the US Constitution. I think that was... in the 70s? I think that date marked the beginning of the end for the United States.

Faz

2) Corporations have no rights.

Hrrmm...

I like:

2) Corporations have no civil rights or human rights?

my sociology of law class says that corporations are legal people....just with a far greater organizational mass, and therefore with preferable treatment by the law. considering the most common action taken by regulatory commissions - whose sole function is to keep tabs on companies - is a "warning without fine," i'd say the system's fucked.

If anything, the original 13-year old
joke, for me, reinforced AE's trademark
in a positive way. Sadly, Leydig, Voit
& Mayer, Ltd.'s letter to R.H.F. did
significant injury to their client's
trademark and reputation.

Except for credit'ing R.H.F. for a
good joke, it's not clear how R.H.F.
is providing a similar service as AE -
unless Leydig, Voit & Mayer, Ltd. are,
in fact, stating by introduction of
their letter, that AE's business
model is a joke...

Help us!

We need heros to defend our human rights. Few of us have the profile or resources to smite Goliath.

The evil animated corporate AI big brother will reduce us all to mill tailings if you do not take up the torch and lead us to burn the corporate heretic.

I am a Man, I am liable to the ultimate degree. Corporations are not. A man faces a man bravely, but those who hide behind corporations are cowards.

The only reason they don't sue everyone is because most of us have not enough to make it worthwhile.

Corporatism is why GW Bush thinks the USA has the right to dictate "freedom and democracy" on their terms to the whole world.

I object.

Keep on trucking. You should establish a defense fund, I will contribute.

Death to all corporations! If a business is not good enough for a Man to stand up and accept responsibility for it's actions, it has no right to exist at all in the presence of a real free human being. I dare them to pass a law saying it ain't so.

Let's put a face on this travesty. Where is the foolish man who would defend this, to his own detriment?

We must win this one, or all men may become chattels of corporations, powerless slaves.

Maybe you should form a corporation specifically to defeat the human race, as parody?

Good luck.

Terry K Spragg.

Oh look, another big bad corporation coming down hard on the little guy. Or maybe it's just a web spider combined with an overworked, underpaid law clerk?

Perhaps a simple "Hey this is satire, not advertising" reponse would be more appropriate than all of this rabid frothing about the mouth?

This is a great time to link to this article and include "Leydig, Voit & Mayer" in your web page. Potential clients should be aware of their brilliant legal strategy and public relations.

It is unclear to me if the original joke is a parody. It doesn't seem to be parodying American Express as much as it is using the American Express theme to make a joke about highways?

In reply to ankh: To be fair to corporations, a lot of so-called "humans" wouldn't pass the Turing Test either. :-)

Hulk think Brad have Big Balls.
Hulk think Brad's response is funny.
Hulk get angry at these puny human lawyers.
Hulk get strong when Hulk get angry.
Hulk want to SMASH them.

Hulk say great job Brad!

Hulk have problem with hitting "Post" button only once. Hulk have poor impulse control.

Terry Spragg writes:
> Corporatism is why GW Bush thinks the USA has
> the right to dictate "freedom and democracy" on
> their terms to the whole world.

You had me up until then, I almost thought you were human. Tell us the truth, you're a Chatbot or a net-spider, aren't you? Your programmed socialist micro-view is laughable and removes you from the Turing Test.

Bush didn't invent the idea, and it is not solely a Republican (as opposed to "conservative") idea/ideal. I woudn't doubt it if most of the politicians are corporations, or at least backed by corporations. Think of it, it doesn't matter WHO wins any nomination, if you (as a corp) can get them to pretend that you exist.

Remember, there's a reason our "justice system" is called "criminal."

Be careful. The legal system doesn't work. The guy with the most money wins, because the legal costs are so high.

Alas, "Patriotic American," while perhaps morally and logically correct, is legally wrong.

"1) Corporations are not citizens."

Corporations have been legal persons under SCOTUS fiat since the 1860's or so. See Korten's WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD.

"2) Corporations have no rights."

The same ruling gave coporations more rights than their employees and other citizens.

"3) Corporations deserve no rights, or protections."

While this may be true, rarely does the law concern itself with "deserve."

"4) Corporations have no right to make or enforce laws."

But they can buy them for the price of a few senators and representatives.

"You've done good patriotic duty defending your country from the corporate enemy, in this case, American Express. Keep the above in mind, and you will never do disservice to your country."

H3ll yes! It's always good to see the bullies, who stack the deck in their favor, lose a round. Now, if we could just undo that part about Corporations being legal persons ...

Funny that the Amex lawyer didn't even try doing a modicum of research before threatening you.

BTW, aren't threats of frivolous litigation themselves actionable?

-jcr

Lame move by American Express. I know it was their lawyers who did it. However, I would hope at least they would know the law. I can only assume they did know this was legal and were "bullying".

I'm going to consider closing my American Express account in protest.

We take it all back! We were just kidding. Please continue your parodies.

Thanks
-Bob
President, American Express

One thing nobody has commented on is that BY LAW companies have to sometimes act like dicks to defend their trademark rights.

The rule with trademarks is use it (AND DEFEND IT) or lose it. Aspirin used to be trademark of Bayer in America. Zipper was another trademark. But if a trademark holder does not VIGOROUSLY defend its trademark against infringers, it can lose it. That's what happened with Aspirin and Zipper.

It's also why years ago there were commercials starring Robert Young telling a frazzled friend to try, "SANKA brand decaffeinated coffee." Nobody talks like that in real life. But they do in a commercial for a product whose name is in danger of becoming a generic term for decaff.

From C&D: "Your unauthorized use of AMERICAN EXPRESSWAY, a mark virtually identical to our client’s AMERICAN EXPRESS mark, is likely to cause consumers to be confused, mistaken, or deceived as to the source of origin of your services."

This is where they sure got the point... I'm so confused, mistaken or deceived that I will sure use Brad's services instead of theirs (for now by adding it to my favorite sites, but please send me application form when you start issuing your card).

Good work Brad!

The briefest of web searches reveals that there is
- an "All American Expressway" in Fayetteville
- an "American Expressway" in Ft. Lauderdale, and
- a "Pan American Expressway" in San Antonio.

I wonder if those city governments have heard from LVM?

They haven't yet, but they will now. Thanks Mark!

Aspirin (and interestingly, Heroin) were trademarks that Bayer AG was forced to relinquish as one of many punitive reparations at the end of WWI.

Secondly, parody has been determined to not infringe trademark.

I think you should be sued for storing such a bad joke for these past 13 years...oh those wasted bytes!

An excellent thread! I'm delighted to have set the tone for discussion by getting in the first comment.

Yes, I know that by legal tradition corporations are considered citizens since shortly after the Civil War. But that doesn't mean it is right or sensible. We American Citizens need to start challenging this legal travesty.

I know it's politically incorrect to defend the US Constitution these days, but could someone show me where in that sacred document that a corporation has so much as a right to exist, let alone rights and priviliges?

And will someone explain why corporations have rights, but no responsibilities? For example, if a corporation is a citizen, then if it murders a human (or another corporation!) it should be eligible for the death penalty. How would you go about executing a corporation?

Being a citizen means having rights AND responsibilities. If a corporation cannot be punished, like a human citizen, for failing at responsibility, it cannot be a citizen.

By the way, my email got mangled at the first post. Hopefully it's correct here.

Remember where the word corporation comes from; the very definition pretty much grants it rights analogous to a person. US case law has supreme court rulings defining a corporation as equivilant to a person as far back as the nineteenth century.

Now personally I think this is crazy, but this is not only how it is, but it is how it has been for a long time.

I guess the analogue of the death penalty for a corporation would be for the state to assume ownership of it, auction off its assets, and then compensate first the bond-holders and second the shareholders in proportion to their stake in the corporation. An analogue of imprisonment might be to replace the elected board with state-appointed managers for a limited period of time. There is also the wide-open world of community service possibilities, which has been reluctantly explored by the US in some of its Microsoft settlements IIRC.

Unfortunately, the legal system lacks the balls to really use these punishments against corporations very often, in sharp contrast to how it treats some poor slob who forgot to renew his driver's license or pay his parking tickets.

Oh my! AE has gone too far. If I ever wanna get rid of my AE Optima card, and I've been thinking of doing just that, I have a great excuse to tell their customer support. I can see it now, "Either you publicly allow the RHF to post their American Expressway joke or you lose my business."

If I ever had to choose between the 2, my choice would be easy. I've had an Optima card since 1994. I've been reading RHF since 1990. I'll stick with RHF.

I think that, since corporations want to play at being people, we should arrest them every time they make another company go out of business. After all, isn't that murder by any other name?

It's like this:

A corporation is born when it is created.

A corporation lives, grows, and eats.

A corporation can die also.

When one corporation uses an idea that another corporation says it owns - it is considered stealing.

The only thing corporations don't want to face up to - is when it kills another business. I think that, given that corporations want to be treated as people, we should not hold back on any of the aspects that a regular person has to face. Especially rape, robbery, and murder. Rape is by forcing another company to submit to your way of doing something. Robbery is taking something by force or stealth. Murder is by removing the other company so it no longer exists.

I LIKE companies to be treated as fellow human beings for these very reasons. What is called competition by them, when taken too far, becomes something else totally different.

Want to know how to kill a company? Keep diverting its attention from making money by throwing one lawsuit after another at it. That is how you kill it. Want to get rid of, say, Microsoft? File lawsuits in every state in the nation at the same time. Or every country around the world. All of their hard earned money will be spent trying to take care of all of them. Do it long enough (and not as a class action suit so they can lump them together) and they will just collapse under the weight of all of those lawsuits. :-)

Take something of theirs which doesn't work, file a claim in small claims court, ask for triple damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act (because they said it would work and it didn't) and they are out three times the value of what you paid for it.
Enjoy!

What a bunch of morons, digging up a 13 year old parody. They're causing far more damage (?) than a joke ever could.

Seems like Leydig, Voit & Mayer, Ltd is having a slow month and needs to justify their high fees with frivolous claims. Perhaps someone at AMEX should review its contract with these jokers.

>> Leydig.. eh Voit I've figured out a way to make quota this quarter...
>> Voit.. holy motions lets apply this to the AMEX account

In response to the comment that corporations were formed by cowards: Corporations are formed because people don't want to go bankrupt if some wacko sues them and wins, receiving multi-millions in damages. Would YOU want to be held personally and financially responsible for the faulty design of engineers who work for you if the design resulted in lives lost, a public relations nightmare, and class action lawsuits? Consider how lawsuit-happy our society is today. It started with corporations not acting responsibly. So people had to sue to get any kind of restitution or justice. Which drives more businesses to incorporate to achieve personal non-liability status. Which increases the likelihood of people being forced to sue for redress of grievances. Which drives more businesses to incorporate.... and so on in a vicious cycle.
I'm not defending corporations for their trigger-happy lawyer-siccing, but I wanted to point out that the individual is more powerful than we think. Powerful enough, that a corporation becomes afraid of losing goodwill if any of its trademarks are mischeviously used even once in the silent, yet strangely communicative void of the world wide web.

this discussion reminded me of this...

http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Lincoln.html

A sobering quote by Abe Lincoln:

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

Excellent thread (and of course I meant 1870s, harumph).

And thanks for the quote, HonestAbe, yikes...

And finally what most bothers me is that in some quarters (even dimes) organizing in unions or by other means is seen as unAmerican or just plain whimpy because The Individual(TM) is supposed to go stand up to The Corporation as an equal and win the conflict by being your basic Ubermench, or something... that DOESN'T WORK, folks, you're outnumbered, (except in parody cases... how the hell did I get here?).

Basically even though corporations have the right to free speech just like you and doesn't mean they ARE just like you and me... Ayn Rand is a nut case.

Faz

The Lincoln quote is phony.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/lincoln.htm

is the practice of sending out these letter actually legal? surely in cases where the recipient is well within their rights such letters are some form of legal harassment that needs to be stopped?

The comment that ...

"Your unauthorized use of AMERICAN EXPRESSWAY, a mark virtually identical to our client's AMERICAN EXPRESS mark, is likely to cause consumers to be confused, mistaken, or deceived as to the source of origin of your services."

... is certainly one of the most ludicrous things I've read recently. Have these people had their sense of humour surgically removed? If the letter had been dated April 1st instead of April 13th I would have assumed that it was an April Fool joke.

If they push forward with this, I'll certainly be one of (I presume) many people cutting up their Amex cards and telling them to get stuffed.

>

If it's the death penalty then surely the shareholders would get nothing. Otherwise it's no punishment at all, and the shareholders could just form a new company with the cash to carry on business.

The current attitude is the criminal convictions translate into fines. If the fine's big enough to bankrupt the company then that's the death penalty.

Except they never are big enough to deter the behaviour, let alone bankrupt the company. Microsoft loses its court case and but the fine is small enough they could budget to lose a court case every few years and still be more profitable than god...

You've got our support!

www.deweycheatemnhowe.com

Corporations might be considered "persons under the law" with all the greed and cold-bloodedness this entails. But should corporations show the flip side of humanity, compassion and and honesty (especially when dealing with single individuals), then they might get my support. As it stands, corporations have neither earned nor deserve the respect they are getting from judges and lawyers. They are lifeless machines whose sole purpose is to gobble up everything (and everyone) in its sight.

To:
Subject: American Expressway
Date: Saturday, April 17, 2004 12:22 AM

Some joker has posted on the Internet, at http://www.templetons.com/brad/leydig.html, a fake letter, putatively from you, that makes you and your firm all look like a bunch of jerks. Thought you ought to know about that. Sorry you have to suffer such abuse.

E-mailed Anne E. Naffziger, LEYDIG, VOIT & MAYER, LTD:

http://www.creditsuit.org/blog/archives/000488.html

"Please let me know if you didn't actually send this alleged C & D, wouldn't want your reputation tarnished if this idiotic C & D was a joke."

>> Aspirin used to be trademark
>> of Bayer in America

Bayer was a German company, and we took Aspirin from them as spoils of war (remember, we fought them a couple of times in the first half of the twentieth century). They didn't lose it per se, it was taken from them..

Bayer also owned the trademark on Heroin (Diacetyl Morphine).

Unless the phrases are specifically trademarked (and last I checked, they weren't), AmEx has no legal standing to order the C&D...

As someone else mentioned, seems like a case of no-sense-of-humor...

Maybe the geniuses at LVM should take a look at how american express financial services division (AEFA) has been SCREWING it's clients for year after year. If the american regulatory agencies such as the SEC were not such a joke these filth would all be in jail.

I hate them ere corporations. They think they can bully us around with ere fancy dancy laws and lawyers. i think thay have another thing coming

I'm sorry to join this thread almost a year late, but I just had to comment on two things.

1) The text of the cease and desist letter proves once and for all that laywers have no sense of humor! They actually seemed to think that "American Expressway" was a real company/service provided. Otherwise, what "service" could actually be confused? I don't think the lawyers are bad people or are trying to harrass anyone, they just don't have any sense of funny.

2) Bayer AG was forced to give up its trademark of "Aspirin" after WWI? Interesting, since they still put the little R in a circle after the word here in Germany! I think someone forgot to tell them!

Can't believe they could be bothered to threaten over this 'joke.' I have had a gold card since 1982 and when in Australia in 2000 I attempted to buy a $7,000AU (approximately $7,000 Canadian) car with my AMEX card. I was denied because it was outside my spending pattern and I had been late paying in October...$1,600 (I mistakenly filed bill without paying but paid in full on next invoice over $4,000 and paid December before leaving for Australia before the bill statement had been posted). I have been late, but always pay in full. I got the mumble jumble about outside my usual spending patterns (I had $30,000 in an AMEX savings account and when they learned that, they were going to use it as collateral, but couldn't access my account number). I ended up paying cash and using MasterCard to make up the difference...MasterCard was great! Meanwhile the saga continues with me writing 3 letters to them and them finally offering me a free year on the card fees and 10,000 points...11,000 points gets me a toaster. The screw-up with AMEX cost 7 days sitting at my friends home hundereds of miles away and then backtracking to the dealer to complete the car transaction. Next time I leave home, it will be WITHOUT my AMEX card...it will be replaced with a Visa card.

True definition of the word waste:

44 Passenger bus full of lawyer going over a 100 ft cliff and having three empty seats.

American Express SUCKS!!! Find out why - visit http://www.amexsux.com/

Hmmm, I see the joke and the Cease and desist letter are still posted. Are you taunting AMex and their lawyers?

GOOD!!!!!

Take this then ...

Upgrade an AMEX from GOLDEN to PLATINUM, the software will automatically cancel the Golden one if you have no debts and that's all. They didn't re-compensate back the money you already paid at the beginning of the year. In my case I paid in July 2007 130 for Golden Amex ( one year fee), in Jan 2008 I applied for Platinum based on the forms they send me , I never used Golden but only today May 3-rd 2008 and to discover that the payment was refused , I payed by debit card and when I get back home I called them and find out what is wrong with the card. I ask them WHEN and WHO canceled the card .. THEY DID , WHEN they canceled ? .. IN JANUARY, it means that I paid 130 for a year they own back me the amount between Jan and Jul ( around 65$ half of the year). In the phone conversation I get the money with no resistance from AMEX which proves that they recognize their mistake, but my next question was why your software didn't do that automatically ... Hm it is easy because foolish my loss and them win free money. .... ok but how much per year , If a million switch a year they win in average 65 millions, ( I consider that some might do that at the begging of the period some at the end so it is and average).

I do not think this is fair either. .... and the authorities should force them to refund the money back.