[ga] What makes a corporation?

["William S. Lovell" <wsl@cerebalaw.com>]

I've raised this question with respect to my own situation
as to what makes a corporation insofar as constituencies
are concerned, and would like to suggest that it has little
to do with whether party X has "Inc." or "LLC" after its
name.  Three people huddled together in an office do not
make the kind of corporation with which the DNSO
procedures should be concerned. (I use my situation as a
model because it's the only one I've got, but there should
be many others in busineses far from the law in situations
that would be comparable to ALJ, LLC.)

One yard stick is that used by the patent law: if you qualify
under the tax laws as a "small business" (or if you are an
individual inventor) you only have to pay half the filing and
some other fees that the large corporations have to pay.
I've forgotten what the cutoff is, since all of my clients (with
the exception of when I did work for Tektronix and TriQuint)
are a long ways from it -- it's something like 300 employees,
as I dimly recall.  However, I would NOT recommend that as
a cutoff, since a company with 50 employees or so could still
own a dozen trademarks and be whaling away with the UDRP
after domain name owners -- that is, I believe, the kind of
stance that the DNSO seems to envision in its distinction of
the corporate constituency.  (Forgive me if there's a definition
somewhere that I don't know about, and if there is, somebody
please clue me in.) Also, there are huge corporations that don't
own any trademarks at all, so "corporation" doesn't really seem
to capture what the DNSO has in mind.

In any case, progress seems to be being made on defining the
constituencies, and I thought it worth while to raise this issue as
well.

Bill Lovell

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