Ed Murphy wrote: >But the things that the natural persons are obligated to do are >different.
A single natural person can be obliged to do several different things by different contracts. That doesn't make em more than one person. >Five players create and register a Pineapple-type partnership (whose >charter merely obliges them to cause it to obey the Agoran rules). They >happen to be the five natural-person members of Primo Corporation (whose >charter obliges them to do various things internal to Primo, e.g. >maintain records). Are these counted as a single partnership, and the >charters counted as a single charter? Assuming there are no non-natural-person members of Primo, the two partnership agreements confer obligations on the same set of natural persons, so I reckon they are governing the same partnership (the same legal person). The members are obliged to abide by both agreements, of course. >One of the five then claims to leave the Pineapple-type partnership, but >remain part of Primo. Now what happens? That's trickier. Changing membership of a partnership is a big extra complexity that we need to address. But I think we should judge what happens in the case of unchanging memberships first. I'm not convinced that a partnership is really capable of changing membership. In RL law it can't: the partnership is a fixed group of natural persons. When I wrote that clause into the PP agreement I was not deciding that it would actually work; it was something to explore later (which we are now doing). If Agoran partnerships can change membership, in this respect they would be more like RL corporations (which can change members while remaining the same entity). My present opinion on the Agoran situation is that if the ultimate target of obligations under a partnership agreement changes then this is now a different legal person. If there are no other partnership agreements with the same set of partners, then the former legal person is extinguished and a new legal person (partnership of the new set of partners) is created. In your case, Primo would continue to be the same person it was before, and the Pineapple-type partnership would become a new legal person (and have the option of registering). I think if we want corporation-style entities, which can change membership while remaining the same entity, then we'll have to legislate them explicitly. Of course, you can get something intermediate under the current system by having shareholders not be partners. -zefram
