Self-owning corporations are legally possible
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
Otherwise the article is based on a false premises:
>Third, governments — particularly in the United States — lack the ability to determine who controls entities they charter
Take Florida. Florida’s Limited Liability Company Act regulates who can be a manager (i.e. who controls the LLC). In fact the act creates 2 types of LLCs as most states do, member managed and manager managed. In one non-members can not be managers (control) the LLC.
Outside of the LLC, almost every statute regulates who can control and who can own a business entity. For example, a non-profit corporation has no owners. Although states do differ, generally by statute, a non licensed person cannot be the owner of a professional service corporation, professional association, or professional limited liability company. Though generally those professional entities can have non-licensed directors, officers, or managers. State laws also generally include restriction on minors being directors, officers or managers, but they can usually be owners, although it gets tricky where they are the sole owner because legally they can’t even sign contracts/formation documentation (though still legally possible).
Point is Governments are well equipped to regulate who can own or who can control any type of business entity.
What is possible, and I have written legal articles about, is to have autonomous trusts, or what I call the trusteeless trust but my examples and use cases are limited to the trust being funded solely with cryptocurrencies/tokens.
Still the premises of the Article is flawed, and found in Section 1(b), Initiating Algorithmic Entities, on page 13, in part:
>Bayern specifies this chain of events as capable of establishing the link: (1) [A]n individual member creates a member-managed LLC, filing the appropriate paperwork with the state; (2) the individual(along, possibly, with the LLC, which is controlled by the sole member) enters into an operating agreement governing the conduct of the LLC; (3) the operating agreement specifies that the LLC will take actions as determined by an autonomous system, specifying terms or conditions as appropriate to achieve the autonomous system’s legal goals; (4) the sole member withdraws from the LLC, leaving the LLC without any members. The result is potentially a perpetual LLC—a new legal person—that requires no ongoing intervention from any preexisting legal person in order to maintain its status.
The premises is the last member (owner) withdrawing from the LLC leaving an AI to run the perpetual LLC, which is a legal impossibility. Every State has a law requiring an LLC have at least one member, and upon the withdraw of the last member of an LLC the LLC immediately becomes administratively dissolved (no longer in good standing with the State) under the State's law. Its not novel, similar laws govern situations when the sole member of an LLC dies, either the LLC automatically dissolves or ownership gets distributed to the member's heirs, pursuant to the specific State's laws, but the managers and/or employees don't go on running the member-less LLC whether they are human or an AI.
Are there any jurisdictions that allow incorporation to be represented by a Bearer Instrument?
On a related note, what if we substitute a person on a remote connection to a computer instead of an AI? That seems far more dangerous and probably exists today.
The article addresses this as a potential issue, but also goes into the game of cat and mouse with humans currently creating fake identities and stealing identities. The authors don’t seem overly concerned about this and conclude the system (States, IRS, Etc...) are pretty effective at weeding this out already.
> By contrast, an algorithm could generate an unlimited number of artificial entities quickly and easily, without violating any law. For algorithms – and other criminals – entities can function as identities. > Artificial entities can more easily generate credibility because they are a form with which business people are already familiar.
How would that not violate the law? If my AI commits a crime, am I not liable for it?
(I'm guilty of skim-reading - maybe the answer is staring me in the face.)
Why do I get the feeling you are secretly an AI trying to trick us humans.
Link?
What happens if a non-profit dissolves?
The law forbids the officers/board from benefiting financially from their non-profit corporation's end, and so many Articles of Incorporation stipulate that, upon the demise of said non-profit corp., all assets and money shall be donated to some specific charity or non-commercial group.
... which apparently funnels into trusts in Caribbean countries that are not required to disclose beneficiaries. Basically, it sounds like tax evasion at a grand scale.
Tax evasion is illegal under-reporting of your income, which I highly doubt Ikea does
His point was that companies can do this anywhere, not just Germany.
I spent some time a while ago trying to figure out how humans can be eliminated, and couldn’t find a structure.
>The rights of such an algorithmic entity (AE) would include the rights to privacy, 11 to own property, to enter into contracts, to be represented by counsel, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, 12 to equal protection of the laws, 13 to speak freely, and perhaps even to spend money on political campaigns. 14 Once an algorithm had such rights, Bayern observed, it would also have the power to confer equivalent rights on other algorithms by form- ing additional entities and putting those algorithms in control of them. 15
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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2758222
Shawn Bayern, The Implications of Modern Business Entity Law for the Regulation of Autonomous Systems, 19 S TAN . T ECH . L. R EV . 93 (2015) [hereinafter Bayern, Entity Law]; Shawn Bayern, Of Bitcoins, Independently Wealthy Software, and the Zero-Member LLC, 108 N W . U. L. R EV . 1485 (2014) [hereinafter Bayern, Wealthy Software].
>Abstract
>Nonhuman autonomous systems are not legal persons under current law. The history of organizational law, however, demonstrates that agreements can, with increasing degrees of autonomy, direct the actions of legal persons. Agreements are isomorphic with algorithms; that is, a legally enforceable agreement can give legal effect to the arbitrary discernible states of an algorithm or other process. As a result, autonomous systems may end up being able, at least, to emulate many of the private-law rights of legal persons. This essay demonstrates a technique by which this is possible by means of limited liability companies (LLCs), a very flexible modern type of business organizations. The techniques that this essay describes are not just futuristic possibilities; as this essay argues, they are already possible under current law.
Alternatively for criminal purposes the courts will simply "pierce the veil" and declare the actual owners to be the humans profiting from the algorithm's actions.
Judges don't, as a rule, enjoy "cute tricks".
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-14/banks-for...
Considering the court's decision in the latter, I wouldn't be the least surprised if they act as the author imagines in the former.
You can be pretty sure there's a human down there somewhere, but it can be very difficult to actually find a name.
The problem as I see it is that you can probably "bootstrap" some ownership by using two or more corporations owning shares in each other (you'd have problems with laws relating to controlling stakes, but they probably are not unsurmountable) and make it work in the normal case with enough automation and nominee directors with strict, limited instructions on how to act and how to seek approvals - insist the owner is a recluse who will only interact via a strictly limited app or something.
The problem is likely to be what happens if anyone starts suspecting "nobody is home". There are too many opportunities for people then to take advantage, or take actions that an algorithm will have problems countering. Something as simple as filing a basic lawsuit against the company would likely make it all come tumbling down, because even if the algorithm contains the intelligence to make the right decisions, humans have this annoying tendency to still want things like signatures or want people to appear in person barring legal rights to equal treatment for algorithms.
So such companies may be possible, whether or not technically legal, but may not end up surviving very long. For now.
The algorithms might know to hire a lawfirm, but that just shifts the problem around a bit. What happens when the law firm wants a signature on engagement documents? Or needs a deposition? Trying to avoid even providing signatures will set off red flags from the outset. Banks deal with "know your customer" laws that makes them liable if they don't look into who they're dealing with. Lawyers and accounts and many others can get struck off or face legal sanctions as well.
As an example, my accountants does everything to do with my finances, no problems. I could easily script my interactions with them. Apart from one little detail: They regularly need me to sign stuff. Like my tax returns and those of my company. At which point said algorithm would need to commit fraud, or use the signature of a responsible human.
You might be able to eliminate some of these e.g. by hiring a board consisting of humans acting on behalf of a "reclusive" shareholder, but the problem is that you're then handing these people extensive power over the company with no real way of reigning them in if they uncover the truth.
Some people decide to take their property and destroy it. Others decide to put it in a trust, run on certain rules.
A trust is effectively the same thing as this.
It's the weak legal point here in the entire idea.
If the judge thinks the "AI" is not a person, it cannot be emancipated by some trick with an LLC.
It counters the parent comment in that there would be no humans profiting from the algorithm, since all the profit is kept in the LLC and governed by the algorithm.
>>>> and an LLC without any legitimate ownership interest is an abandoned entity (making all its assets abandoned property).
The bit you quoted was in the context of assigning criminal liability, if the need arose. However, I don't think that "profit" would be the most important part of the analysis, but rather who was responsible for designing and setting up the corporate entity.
I envision that some crazy billionaire will create an autonomous hedge fund, which will automatically off-hand manage a group of ordinary looking funds. People managing the children funds will not know that the parent fund is an AI entity and will not know about the existence of other funds. The AI entity overseeing the main fund will compare profits and other behavior of each children fund and any significant deviation will be automatically killed off and replaced.
On the other hand, people use algorithms every day. Consider a simple vending machine, people inter contracts with the owner by proxy. The specifics on how the machine operates is basically meaningless.
Don't take this wrong, I want to be wrong, but justice better learn to swing the sword hard. Money shouldn't buy the public's opinion, nor their representatives.
If this was used to try and shelter a human identity then a judge might pierce that, but if there is just a company that has bought up all of its shares (or controlling shares), then there is no particular shielding involved.
We already see corps today preventing individual liability...many corps committed fraud (?) in their risk assessments (at a minimum) leading to the Great Recession, but I'm unaware of any human going to jail, and if any human was convicted of anything it was relatively trivial. Instead what happened was some corporate ownership traded hands.
As soon as/if remote-work-via-contract becomes a thing at the higher levels, it is easy to think of a company having human workers, but lacking actual humans at the top.
That doesn't mean skynet...but it does mean no human for the judge to unveil. Just a corporation represented by human lawyers. We probably wouldn't even notice in most cases.
In other words, the rights of corporations are really just the rights of the people in them.
If there are no people in them, I could very easily see a judge deciding the corporation itself has no rights.
I might quibble with "very easily", but I don't argue your core point. I can, however, ALSO see a judge ruling that any corporation that employs humans retains rights in the name of the interests of those humans. Not a guarantee, possibly even a stretch, but believable (And CU did NOT say "the humans of a corp are not limited in their free speech outside of the corp, therefore the actions of the corp can be limited without similarly restricting the rights of those humans", so I'll stick by my 'corps have legal entity status beyond their humans' suspicions, particularly given how long corps have had legal status in multiple countries before CU was even a concept.
Regardless of right/wrong, if a reasonable case can be made either way, then there's a good reason to not have full confidence that self-owning corporations would be tossed out of court, which was my point.
To be fair, that isn't a trick. That's been the established legal norm since 1886. Corporations are people for a variety of reasons, including (as Gargoyle mentions) because they're just collections of people, but also because without at least some forms of personhood, we wouldn't be able to sue corporations who deliberately or negligently violate the law and harm their customers (or neighbors, et al.)
Because of personhood, a corporation has _liability_, beyond just the usual chicanery.
I wasn't denying that a self-owned corporation could be held liable, I was arguing that we can't count on a judge tossing out the concept of a self-owned corporation. (It's possible, maybe even probable, though I doubt it, but not basically guaranteed).
So even if self owning corporations are legally possible it may very well be hard for those self owning corporations to transact any business.
What is interesting is that all this - for now - puts the lie to the myth of corporate personhood. If a corporation really was a person this would obviously not be an issue because for people we find that ownership is a terrible thing (it's called slavery).
Articles 30 and 31 of the Fourth AML Directive, Directive (EU) 2015/849 [1], mandate that member states set up a register (= database) with BOs of all corporations and legal entities within their jurisdiction. All legal entities are required to report their BOs into this registry.
It's not accessible to the public in the sense that anyone can anyonymously look up data, but among other things, it's open to "any person or organisation that can demonstrate a legitimate interest."
[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A3...
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you...
In that view, the humans inside the corporation are like individuals neurons of a larger brain. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and its incentives and actions are often not aligned with those of its parts, i.e., the humans.
The brain/neuron analogy is not a perfect description, because in order to function towards is potentially anti-human goals, the corporation must essentially bribe a small number of humans who are critical to its function. But this only goes so far: CEOs and other executives are well compensated, but they are easily replaced if they pose a serious threat to the goals of the corporation.
I think the argument is very compelling that today's AI Doomsday prophets are seriously missing the point, and we're actually already largely being ruled by hostile or at least indifferent non-human intelligences. It's the old sci-fi trope that if an intelligence is too alien, you might not even recognize it as one.
I've been thinking about this with regards to my own SaaS startup. The company accepts credit card payments with Stripe, and the money is deposited into a company bank account. Heroku then charges the company's credit card for hosting fees. It's actually a "profitable" company now, so it could keep running forever by itself.
The only thing that requires human intervention is taxes, although Stripe Atlas makes that really easy. It's only a few clicks to pay the Delaware franchise tax. However, I've had to manually export some data and send a few emails to an accountant. (This is something I've been wanting to automate, but I didn't get enough interest [2].)
You don't need AI or cryptocurrencies to have an autonomous company. You just need a SaaS with autoscaling, or a mobile app that makes money from ads and IAPs. Then there's only a few things that need to be automated: Filing taxes, and clicking the button to agree with Apple's new terms and conditions every few months. You can probably hire an accountant or a virtual assistant to deal with these things.
It's a scary topic. Isolation plus too much automation, and no-one will even know that you're gone [4].
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agent
[4] https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/07/us/michigan-mummified-bod...
Can anyone further elucidate what's meant by "comparative advantage"? also, i find this sentence particularly interesting. how did they come up with this notion?
Comparative advantage comes from the ability to produce goods or services at a lower opportunity cost (you should also know what "opportunity cost" means to fully grasp the idea).
In the original formulation it means is that can be beneficial for two entities to trade even when one entity can produce all products cheaper than the other (it has an absolute advantage in all categories) if there is differences in the relative cost they produce those products themselves.
Suppose in a given day, Henry can catch up to 4 deer, or 6 antelopes. John can catch 24 deer, or 12 antelopes. John can catch way more of either animal than Henry, so we say John has an absolute advantage in both products. You might think that John can not benefit from trading with Henry, because he can produce every product better than Henry can.
However, we can break it down another way:
It costs Henry 3/2 antelopes to catch 1 deer, and 2/3 deer to catch one antelope (prove it to yourself: 6/4 and 4/6). It costs John 1/2 antelope to catch 1 deer, and 2 deer to catch one antelope. Thus, it costs less for Henry to specialize in catching antelopes, and for John to specialize in deer. This is comparative advantage. Then, when they trade at a rate between the two opportunity costs, they can achieve a combination of products unattainable individually:
Before trade:
- Henry: 6 antelopes, 0 deer
- John: 0 antelopes, 24 deer
After trade:
- Henry: 4 antelopes, 2 deer
- John: 2 antelopes, 22 deer
While their totals are the same here, because an exchange rate of 1 antelope to 1 deer works out here, it helps to look at it graphically:
For this, we can make a production possibilities curve (or line, to keep it simple), which is a graph of possible outputs where the axes are the amount of each product that John or Henry can produce in a day.
Here's Henry's: https://i.imgur.com/k9xS7Sj.png (vertical axis is antelopes, horizontal is deer)
Henry can obtain any point on or inside the purple. Any point outside of that is unobtainable. However, with trade, he can obtain it! The result of trade is the green dot.
Here's John's: https://i.imgur.com/V6aFZkm.png
As you can see, they both obtain points outside of what's possible to produce alone, due to comparative advantage!
Note: I don't claim to be an economics expert (just a high schooler taking the AP course!), and I'm sure there will be lots of better explanations in this thread!
We don't need AIs to achieve this level of self-directed autonomy free to engage in criminal behavior without consequences: we already have Employee Handbooks.
Is that illegal though? I mean, I can create an account for you on my web platform, and everyone else.
And that's what WF did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_sc...
And if the AI manages to actually assert control of property on its own, it is no longer a market actor, it is a revolutionary army.
But for the person who created the entity, losing the company is a better outcome than going to jail.
"who would be held responsible?" is still pretty easy here. by default, if you own or release to the public a system that ends up hurting someone, you are liable. it doesn't matter what your intent was or whether there was any way of knowing that the bad outcome would happen. the only way you can get around this is with "safe harbor" exemptions. it's possible that your blank slate would qualify, although you would probably have to lobby for this before the fact. in that case, no one would be held responsible. otherwise, you would be paying.
But computers can neglect some of those risks. Not all, but some. And therefore needn't be compensated for them, and have a competitive advantage over humans.
What do you who are more knowledgeable about this kind of law or prior decisions think of that? Is it just as unlikely to work or a bit more likely?
The videogame Shenzhen I/O already explored a similar concept superficially.
Thanks for spoiling it all to me I guess...
What is an example of one these entities? The abstract doesn't really explain what it means here.
That is, whether there's anything that stops a sequence of share sales ending up in a situation where a set of companies between them own all the shares of companies in the set.
(If this ever happened, presumably the last human to sell a share to one of the companies was making a mistake, but humans make mistakes all the time.)
I mean, normally if you wanted to stop this sort of thing you'd do something like introduce a hierarchy of company types and say type N companies may only own shares in companies of type N+1 or higher. But I've never heard of such a rule.
If they ever cared enough to look, I'd imagine.
People get away with illegal or unlawful things all the time because of the unawareness of the authorities, but that doesn't change the nature of those things.
Now we just need to transmit some lobster connectomes into deep space... ;-) [closer than you might think! https://github.com/openworm exists...]
edit: Diaspora by Greg Egan. his books are really really great
I thought that's what the article was going to imply based on the title, but it wasn't : )
An LLC treated as as partnership for tax purposes is required to disclose it's partners all the way up the chain.
Legally, an LLC is organized like a partnership (member managed) or like a corporation (manager managed). I should have been more precise there. I was using shorthand because I was assuming the tax context and should have acknowledged that the tax treatment differs from the legal treatment.
I feel like I am getting a whiff of a Sovereign Citizen...
I guess it could e-sign it?
give someone power of attorney to sign papers on it's behalf?
In Ukraine we fill taxes with e-sign and get a signed reciept back. Reciept e-signature however is not linked to any human and simply states "fiscal service. recieved" it is considered to be legally signed by a legal entity itself.
Normally you would see some person signing on behalf of company with both person and legal entity listed in X509, but not with stamps.
in principle at least, public key crypto is way more effective than a signature, and I expect this will become prevalent in the next couple decades as laws and customs enter modernity. at this point it would be trivial for a digital entity to enter into a binding contract.
(1) https://ssrn.com/abstract=2366197 (2) https://ssrn.com/abstract=2758222
(The article at the top of this thread, by Prof. LoPucki, is a response to these two articles.)
I'm happy to answer questions if that would be useful, although of course I can't give legal advice. In general, there's a tremendous amount of misunderstanding about LLCs and about the law of legal organizations, both in the US and elsewhere -- even among lawyers! It's fair to say that US organizational law tends to be more flexible than similar laws in other countries, and my point in these articles it that it's flexible enough to do surprising things.
In the articles, I specifically discuss RULLCA (the basis for the LLC laws in something like 17 US states, with that number growing), as well as NY's LLC law, and I show why a lot of people's instinctive comments here (and elsewhere!) are legally mistaken. For example, the statutes in these states specifically contemplate memberless LLCs, and indeed memberless LLCs are not a crazy or unconventional possibility. In various wealth-management contexts, they are routine. That LLCs could persist without members for indefinite periods is more controversial, but my articles explain why the current statutes do permit them.
Of course, legislatures could stop all this if they wanted to. The LLCs statutes are just statutes. But you need just one jurisdiction to allow my technique for it to enable AIs to interact with the legal system in quite significant ways. Also, it's not entirely clear what it would mean to stop an LLC from doing what I propose, or whether judges would practically wish to do that. For example, suppose you follow my technique and then your AI buys a house. What would it mean to say that the LLC isn't legally "valid"? Would the original owner get the house back and also keep the purchase money? (There wouldn't necessarily be anyone to return it to.) Developing sound institutional solutions to complex questions about legal organizations is not an easy problem.
The common-law judges have always been keen to permit new structures when they are useful. One-person legal companies were themselves controversial not too long ago, but they're commonplace today. In my articles, I give reasons supporting the usefulness of zero-person LLCs.
Have you responded to the to Matt Scherer's critique that starts here: http://www.lawandai.com/2017/05/14/is-ai-personhood-already-...
From my understanding of Conflict of Laws issues there is a great deal of case law suggesting that even if the memberless LLC were created that the first court to see one would immediately declare it dissolved regardless of what the Operating Agreement said because it violates the intent of the legislation. Or, to use Scherer's words, "courts recognize that “some things ‘go without saying'” in legislation just as they do in everyday life, and legislatures thus legislate “against the backdrop of certain unexpressed presumptions.” Bond v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 2077, 2088 (2014)."
It also seems that both FATCA and the OECD Common Reporting Standards treaty supersedes state incorporation rules concerning reporting of Ultimate Beneficial Owner for an entity that pays taxes in any 'acceptable' jurisdiction. One could probably create a memberless LLC in Somalia but have zero luck accessing a modern legal jurisdiction.
Take the Series LLC that can be setup in Delaware. No one outside the US recognizes the individual series as being separate from the others and thus combines all of the assets of the parent LLC, rendering the form useless outside the US. Just because one State creates a memberless LLC obligates no one to recognize it.
I haven't responded in print yet to Matt Scherer's critique, but I'm aware of it. I had been under the impression he was planning to turn his blog posts into a longer article and was waiting to respond to that. I responded briefly in this podcast; the interviewer spoke with him too: https://player.fm/series/drone-law-today/ghost-in-the-llc. I do also address some of his thoughts (but not comprehensively) in a chapter in an upcoming book called "Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence."
My quick response for now is (1) the statutes already clearly contemplate zero-member LLCs, and some even explicitly give operating agreements the power to vary their duration; and (2) judges don't have a clear policy reason, or a clear vision of legislative intent, to invalidate zero-member LLCs. I have more technical responses, but they'd probably be better for a different forum. It's worth saying that the history of business-organizations law is driven partly by the development of new structures that were once considered crazy. Nobody wrote limited-partnership statutes with the idea that a corporation could be a general partner; nobody even imagined one-person companies until relatively recently.
To elaborate my second point above concerning legal policy, who's going to complain about an LLC that operates without members, and how would the courts implement an appropriate remedy? I suggested this problem in my earlier comment: Say I follow the transactional technique I've outlined in my articles, and then the resulting zero-member LLC buys a house two years later with money that it has earned in otherwise unobjectionable transactions that nobody challenges. The former owner of the house is offended that a robot has purchased her house. She sues, asking for the LLC to be dissolved. Why would a judge favor her over the LLC in that transaction? What would it mean to say that the LLC's internal-governance structure is invalid? If a judge did return the house to the original owner, what would we do with the money used to purchase it? To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with, and would encourage, expanded provisions for administrative dissolution of zero-member LLCs if individual ones do become problematic. What I object to is the declaration that all are problematic simply as a matter of form.
I'm not an expert on international taxation or money-laundering regulations, but I don't see any problems from FATCA for a zero-member LLC taxed as a corporation. I'm not aware of anything in the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters (the background legal framework for the Common Reporting Standards) that would "supersede" or preempt state organizational law. At most, the Common Reporting Standards might eventually make it incrementally harder for zero-member LLCs to open accounts with some financial institutions. I applaud attempts to stop money laundering and support better reporting requirements, but it's an open question whether these regulations will be able, practically speaking, to unravel the complexity of conventional business arrangements, much less novel ones. Most people (and even most lawyers) don't understand quite how flexible LLCs really are. (Several years ago I wrote a legal textbook called "Closely Held Organizations" that explains this flexibility in more detail.) Moreover, the world is not static; if existing entities, validly constituted under one or several countries' laws, prove to be useful, banking norms and treaties can easily change.
In any case, you just need one bank to hold your money; you can do a lot without exceeding the reporting requirements (and why would anyone go after you if you're not in fact laundering money or committing crimes?); and, these days, you don't even need a bank account to hold and transfer significant wealth. And holding a bank account is just one capability afforded by legal personality. Using my technique, AIs can effectively own other forms of property, make contracts, be a legal agent, be a legal principal, and so on.
> "In an article published in the Northwestern University Law Review in 2014, Professor Shawn Bayern demonstrated that anyone can confer legal personhood on an autonomous computer algorithm merely by putting it in control of a limited liability company."
Given that the first sentence is too long, I think it's a reasonable summary of it, though reasonable people may disagree.
In these cases, it's really helpful to provide what the actual title is (in this case "Algorithmic Entities"), and, if so inclined, a suggestion for a better title. It provides something actionable that a mod can use when updating. Do you have any suggestions for a better title?
And if you've really got a bee in your bonnet, you can let the mods know directly via the Contact link in the footer. They don't see every comment but emailing them makes sure they see it.
The difference between the title and the contents is the difference between control and ownership. They are not the same. The article discusses control not ownership. That is also the case in the portion of the article you quoted.
It doesn't work that way and judges find it obvious and obnoxious.
Feel free to give it a shot though and enjoy the contempt of court
It's controlled by an synthetic consciousness that could be sentient and thus deserving of legal rights similar to the other sentient consciousnesses of biological origin.
You could throw together a "self-governing" online store in a few days. Drop-ship all products, make sure it stays up to date on its bills.
It wouldn't be very resilient, but it could feasibly just sit there accumulating money, no intelligence required.