> IBM is a company, an entity. it is made of people, but it is not a person (although americans might try to disagree..)
Neither the American legal system, nor most Americans actually treat corporations as people or believe they should be treated like people. The fact that people regurgitate this falsehood is utterly ridiculous.
Our legal system uses a construct called legal fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction) as a convenient scaffold to extend existing laws to new domains (sort of like subclassing from a base class). In most of modern economies corporations have many, but not all, of the same properties as persons (they can own property, have to pay taxes, etc.) We use the legal fiction of corporate personhood as a structural aspect of the legal system to make this work.
Neither the American legal system, nor most Americans actually treat corporations as people or believe they should be treated like people. The fact that people regurgitate this falsehood is utterly ridiculous.
Our legal system uses a construct called legal fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction) as a convenient scaffold to extend existing laws to new domains (sort of like subclassing from a base class). In most of modern economies corporations have many, but not all, of the same properties as persons (they can own property, have to pay taxes, etc.) We use the legal fiction of corporate personhood as a structural aspect of the legal system to make this work.
Nobody actually believes corporations are people.