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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

This seems relatively cheap to fix. Spin off Yahoo Groups as a new corporation, and have that corporation subsequently donate all its assets. If the corporation somehow manages to get sued, it doesn't really matter, since it has no assets.

Or spin it off and sell it.

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No non-privately owned company would ever willingly put itself through the legal and tax requirements for spinning off a new company with part of its assets just to do the right, non-profitable thing, with those assets.

Also, in my opinion, no privately owned company either, unless the owner was soon dying of something and wanted to get in good with their creator.

I’d assume the law is smarter than this, because companies would otherwise continually spin of new corporations to get rid of their liabilities with no assets as a sort of lightning rod for lawsuits.

This is, iiuc, how the movie and construction industries work. Spin up a minicorp for every big risky project to shield the mother ship.

When you create the SPV in advance, it's very clear what part of the work done by the organization attaches to it (because the organization ensures that all its processes explicitly specify the legal compartment they're running under.)

When you create an SPV after-the-fact, you have to go back and reverse-engineer a separation of liabilities from documents that don't specify whether they're work done for the organization or the SPV (because the SPV didn't exist.)

It's like a divorce. (Or, for an even more on-the-nose analogy, it's like trying to use a condom after-the-fact by extracting any bodily contamination and putting it in the condom.)

They do it regularly. Lead in gasoline (ethyl corp), asbestos.

If Yahoo Groups has a GDPR obligation now (and it's not clear that they do) they don't erase obligation that by spinning up a different company and dumping all this personal data into that new company - that would be its own GDPR breach.

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