> One recoils at the thought of it and can only wonder who within Cisco would have countenanced it all.
That's the thing. "Cisco" would be hard to hold accountable. But people made those decisions. Was the law broken (false testimony == perjury? barratry?) If so, it was broken by people.
Hold people accountable and you'll see less abuse.
The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to effect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person. One theme is its assessment as a "personality", as a result of an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite[nb 1] led to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The film's assessment is effected via the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV; Robert Hare, a University of British Columbia psychology professor and a consultant to the FBI, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically-diagnosed psychopath. The documentary concentrates mostly upon North American corporations, especially those of the United States.
The film is in vignettes examining and criticizing corporate business practices. It establishes parallels between the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave and the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.
Yes, but that's rather beside the point. Corporations might be psychopaths, but having no hands they physically cannot commit murder - and having no minds cannot even enter into a conspiracy to commit murder. They're like a medical patient in a vegetable state: a legal person and able to interact with the world through those they have granted power of attorney, but not able to take independent action.
EDIT: I should point out, it isn't impossible that a person in a vegetable state could commit some criminal offence - goodness knows we have a lot of laws on the books - and it isn't impossible for a corporation to commit a criminal offence either. Just difficult and/or unusual. On the other hand both can easily commit civil offences and corporations are prosecuted for those all the time.
So if there was a crime committed in lying to the police, it was committed by a human being and unlike certain government workers, people acting on behalf of a corporation enjoy no immunity to prosecution.
And I think you're being overly broad in accusing all corporations of the sins of the view. Corporations that are sole proprietorships seem to have all the same morality as the person who owns them. Non profit corporations like the ACLU also appear to display much more morality than a psychopath, as well. And there are many large groups of people - governments and political parties and so forth - which act like psychopaths without being corporations.
100 years ago, yes, a corporation's actions would lay entirely at the feet of people executing them on its behalf. Now, though, a corporation is made up of just as much automation—web services, manufacturing plants, stock trading AI agents—as it is humans. A corporation could do a person a wrong with no human having any sort of mens rea, save perhaps for a systems engineer who signed off on the consequences of interactions of the project components.
For example, see the many cases where hosting providers have received automatic DMCA takedown notices because some spider detected supposedly-infringing content on one of their hosted websites. Did any person decide to send these notices? Is any human legally at-fault for these actions at all?
> Did any person decide to send these notices? Is any human legally at-fault for these actions at all?
Valid DMCA notices require a statement made under penalty of perjury. Either someone is signing them (and therefore liable), or they're not proper DMCA. That said, people frequently respond to and take stuff down even when issued an improper notice.
That said, I've never heard of anyone getting in serious trouble for filing improper notices, even fairly absurd ones, though I think the EFF litigated one such case over the short YouTube clip of the baby dancing to some big label music. I've also never heard of someone getting convicted of perjury for sending a fraudulent notice, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
That's the thing. "Cisco" would be hard to hold accountable. But people made those decisions. Was the law broken (false testimony == perjury? barratry?) If so, it was broken by people.
Hold people accountable and you'll see less abuse.