On Mon, 1 Apr 2013, Wes Contreras wrote: > On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 1:05 PM, Tanner Swett <[email protected]> wrote: > > Simply put: the rules about second-class players are there because we > > have, from time to time, had second-class players (only partnerships, > > as far as I remember), and so it's likely that we'll need those > > mechanisms in the future. > > But to what purpose? More specifically, what do the Rules enable a > Second-Class Player to do that non-Player entities are unable to do? > > Depending on what powers are so granted, if any, then from a > readability standpoint if nothing else, it may be desirable to call > them something other than a "Player."
We went through a period from 2007-2010 where 2+ people could form a partnership (a contract) and it would have corporate personhood. We had a few such corporations hold officer positions with the partners splitting the load, as contests they could gain currencies like a person then distribute it to contest members as awards, and of course they were used for scams (some of them genuinely interesting, with nested shell corporations and overlapping contractual obligations, etc.) It actually started with the very controversial CFJ 1622; the rules then allowed contracts, and there were rules on equity law as separate from inquiry law, and personhood was less-well defined then. The CFJ (judged TRUE) claimed that by suitable legal definitions, a partnership could claim personhood status (since legal definitions took precedence over common ones). And since all persons at the time could register, these "corporate persons" could register and become players with no restriction. So then the definitions of person were made stricter, including adding second-class, to admit the possibility, but to greatly control their use. If we don't want them in general, we'd need to make sure that the rules explicitly forbid anyone but a first-class person from being defined as a person. -G.
