They are in an industrial park in the outskirts of Antwerp, the second-largest port in Europe. There was a chance it could have come from someone else. But theirs was the factory specifically making the stuff in bulk, so the chance it wasn't them was very, very small.
Lawyers did their jobs and sought alternative explanation where possible, exhausting the explanations until it wasn't reasonable or plausible. 3M is a huge corporation, and corporations run on algorithms coded as laws, regulations, and company rules, which are executed by employees.
It's not surprising or even noteworthy for 3M to deny culpability until they can't. Not that it's good or right or ethical, but corporations are rule based non human entities that shouldn't be viewed as equivalent to or extensions of humans. They often behave inhumanely and despicably because the rules allow them to do so. That's a failure of the rules and system in which they operate. Bad actors, like the Sackler family, can direct a corporation down a legitimately evil path, but usually the negative externalities aren't the fault of companies.
If 3M takes responsibility and cleans it up, or puts resources into figuring out how, I would see that as a good thing. If they shuffle things around, draw out the resolution, screw people over, then they'd be joining Nestlé and their ilk.
We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.
> corporations are rule based non human entities that shouldn't be viewed as equivalent to or extensions of humans.
Thanks for this phrasing. Any books, essays or videos that you would recommend on this perspective? How about the Citizens United ruling in the U.S.?
> We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.
What are some best practices or successful case studies for this approach? Could smart contracts and DAOs be regulated?
They already are: contracts and companies have legal definitions and processes. If you shoehorn a blockchain in the middle it doesn't change that.
The law generally doesn't get involved in informal agreements, like smart contracts and DAOs usually are, but then you don't get much recourse if you get screwed over (unless it's outright fraudulent or otherwise illegal). Which, a lot of the time is the point of making it a DAO only and not having any actual legal entity.
There are also lots of cases where blatantly illegal activity is gotten away with right out in the open because law enforcement don't even know to look, or how to look. Ponzi schemes, pump and dump shitcoins, fake bids on nfts, and so on. We don't need new laws, we need educated enforcement. If I steal a million dollar painting, a million dollar lottery ticket, a million dollars cash, or a million dollars in bitcoin, the laws are there to protect the victim and require repayment and jail time and so on.
NFTs have some particularly egregious examples of scams and schemes by A-list famous people, and nothing gets done because everyone involved in the transactions are frothing at the mouth crazy over "web 3, omg."
As far as smart contracts go, basic control logic has to be built and a library of modules made available and a system cultivated by which users and developers can test and validate everything. Reversible transactions and failsafe mechanisms have to be the foundation of any investment so that when errors inevitably occur, someone in charge can unfuck things. A board of directors could be given individual keys in a multi-signature scheme, or so on.
Once or twice a month we're seeing crypto thefts in the 7+ figures and it's always because of obscure flaws in the code that could be avoided by developing on tested, verifiable, and validated code. That means a level of rigor only currently seen in international banking, nasa missions, and so on.
The big problem with crypto investing right now is "I wrote this smart contract last weekend at a hackathon, let's invest millions of dollars!"
Decentralization doesn't mean everything has to or should be decentralized - sometimes its enough that the overarching system is not under the thumb of an arbitrary authority. Centralized entities within the bitcoin or ethereun ecosystem will be the first crypto banks and exchanges, and you'll eventually be able to code legal requirements directly into contracts (and vice versa, once the ruling class starts to include people educated in cryptocurrency.)
Right, but all of this is orthogonal to the law. If you want a company that's run using a DAO, you can have one. If your smart contract doesn't contain stipulations disallowed in contact law, you can use it. Stealing and fraud is always illegal, regardless of the vehicle used, and still applies even if there isn't a legal contract. Sure, the police don't know enough to do a good job, but that doesn't make hacking and theft legal, just likelier to be gotten away with then a bank robbery.
Of course, few people actually use crypto as an adjunct to legal system: some specifically don't want the legal processes (and protections) to kick in, and some just want to have used pure crypto for it's own sake even when a existing systems would have sufficed.
