How to prevent non-profit from being taken over? I am a board member of a very small non-profit (we have about 15-20 members). I have heard a real life story about how a non-profit similar to ours was taken over. A few &quot;new members&quot; joined that non-profit, invited a whole bunch of &quot;friends and family members&quot; to join as well, and when elections came those &quot;friends and family&quot; all voted for these &quot;new members&quot;, which became new board members and changed the non-profit for worse. It was a purposeful take over. Edit (additional info): These &quot;friends and family&quot; did not exercise their own free will in voting process; they were told by &quot;new members&quot; to vote for them (for the sole purpose of &quot;take over&quot;), which they did because they are &quot;friends and family&quot;. How can we prevent a similar scenario happening to us? We were thinking of only allowing people to vote after they were a member for like a year or two, but that could only delay the &quot;take over&quot;. Is there a better solution? Update - more details on how we accept members. Currently anyone can join as a member. It's just a matter of &quot;new member&quot; meeting with one of our Board Members (BM), signing a bit of paperwork, signing up for PayPal auto-pay (there is monthly membership fee) and BM giving out an RFID card for access. We are currently working on improving this model to be more safe. If you have ideas on how we can improve this on-boarding model that could help solve the &quot;take over&quot; problem please share your suggestions as well. To answer this question in comments: are there criteria currently we don't have any criteria. However, if there would be criteria they would be something like &quot;don't join our non-profit to steal things or to take over, or stuff like that&quot;. So, essentially, the nature of our non-profit is that anybody can join. The problem is filtering out people with bad intentions.
That isn’t a “takeover” Most importantly because not-for-profits do not exist as financial vehicles for their owners, they are a resource of the community for the benefit of their members, both current and future - that’s why they get tax concessions. Further, what you describe isn’t a takeover, it’s the members of an organisation expressing their democratic rights to have the organisation run by the people they choose to run it. The correct response from an ex-board member in this situation is to congratulate the winners, wish them luck, and offer them whatever transitional and ongoing support they can in the best interests of the organisation. A board member has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the organisation irrespective of their personal feelings and desires. You can disagree with the direction a new board is taking an organisation but that’s their call, not yours. Indeed, many not-for profits benefit, some even need, renewal at the board level. A junior sports club needs to be run by the parents of the children playing now, not those who played 30 years ago. What can you do? There are a number of things that can be done, however, given the fiduciary duty the directors owe to the organisation, some of these are … problematic to outright illegal. The list below is arranged from least problematic to least most problematic. Get big. The Red Cross and Amnesty International don’t have to worry about this because they have so many members that a small clique can’t gain control. Restrict membership. The organisation exists for a purpose, it is perfectly legitimate to restrict membership to people who are actively pursuing that purpose. For example, returned services organisations can legitimately restrict voting members to those who served overseas on active duty. Similarly, sporting clubs can legitimately restrict voting membership to those (or the parents of children) who are actively playing or coaching the sport. Stagger board elections. Board members serve for 2 years and only half the board is up for election at each AGM. Local law may prohibit this but it does provide for greater stability generally. Create executive positions that aren’t elected. For example, there can be an executive role for “past-Presidents” or Guardians who are appointed for a long-term, possibly life. Such roles legitimately create corporate memory and incidentally guard against the type of rapid turnover you are worried about. However, depending on local law, this might be illegal. In some jurisdictions, companies can set up poison pills to enhance the rights of existing shareholders over the rights of future shareholders. However, these are not legal in the UK for example and do not apply to the type of organisation you describe which has members rather than shareholders. Even if it is legal, such structures are often not suitable for not-for-profits as they may be ineligible for tax exemption, charitable status or to be tax-deductible gift recipients. Before doing anything, get legal advice.
Companies have a registry of their shareholders. Anyone with at least one share registered in their name is a shareholder of record. However, the vast majority of people who consider themselves &quot;shareholders&quot; aren't actually registered owners of a stock. Instead, almost all public stock in the US is held &quot;in street name.&quot; That means that the stock is formally held in the name of a brokerage. What an individual has is &quot;beneficial ownership:&quot; the brokerage passes dividends on to the beneficial owner, will vote how the beneficial owner tells it to vote, and requires agreement from the beneficial owner before it can sell the stock. To make stuff even more complicated, the broker itself generally holds the stock in street name. Almost all public stock in the US is really owned by the Depository Trust Corporation in the name of Cede and Company (a general partnership of a few DTC officers). The reason public stock is mostly held in street name is efficiency. Transferring the legal owner of a piece of stock is a nontrivial process; until recently, it involved physically shipping stock certificates to the new owner. Even now that stock ownership can typically be transferred electronically, it's much easier to tell Cede &amp; Co. &quot;the new beneficial owner is this person.&quot; Because beneficial ownership is just a contract, you can skip all the formalities of updating the company's official register of shareholders.
In an extreme hypothetical situation: at a meeting where there is a quorum present, there are 50 members qualified to vote in attendance. An issue comes up for a vote, and 45 people abstain, 3 vote yes, 2 vote no. Would this pass 3 to 2, or is there some overriding part of &quot;majority present and voting&quot; that I am just not understanding? The measure would pass 3-2. The words mean what they say. Quorum requirements prevent the small number of people voting from being unfair.
You can't You are asking the analogue of &quot;What happens when you start a game of chess with the black queen on D1?&quot; and the only correct answer is &quot;That is not a legal starting position, the only position the Black Queen may have at the start of the game is D8. Re-setup the board to how it should be.&quot; An AI can't hold property, because it is not a recognized legal entity, and trying to file for a transfer to an illegal recipient is in itself impossible. As such, all your plan fails on step 1 (transfer property to AI) and all other questions are moot - the position required can't come up legally, and attempting to get it done results in the documents that tried to do it being all Void and Null: The person that tried to get rid of the company is the owner. That person is liable for all the tax that needs to be paid. All lawsuits against the corporate or the owner proceed as if nothing had happened. YES, you could be sued for attempted tax evasion, communally called &quot;tax fraud&quot;.
The shareholders can change who is the company director, but the company director runs the company (until he or she resigns or is forced to sign by the shareholders). So the company director is who has the say what happens in the company. If the contract is between Fred and John Smith directly, then I would expect John Smith to give the orders and to pay Fred. However, Tom is company director, so he can order Fred to stay off the company premises. He can't order Fred what to do, since there is no contract between Fred and the company, and the company won't pay Fred if it doesn't want to - it's up to John Smith to pay Fred from his own pocket. The whole setup is highly unusual. I would assume that the situation is unsatisfactory for everyone involved, so likely they will agree that the contract between John Smith and Fred is cancelled, that there is a new contract between Small Company Ltd and Fred, and from then on the company director gives the orders.
Why would the method by which you transfer a item that has a copyright impact the copyright? You buy a new book at a new bookstore, a used book at a used bookstore, a used book at a garage sale, someone gives you a book, you find a book on the sidewalk, you steal a book from a store, you buy and download an ebook, you give an ebook to someone on a USB stick, you download an ebook via Bittorrent. The author's copyright - as well as the design copyright, and any book company trademarks - does not change in any of those scenarios. Copyright around most of the world - read Berne Convention (Wikipedia) - says that copyright exists at the moment of creation of a work, i.e. a work that you say is "100% yours". This has nothing to do with the way the work may be transmitted or stolen or downloaded. A work in the public domain can still be copyrighted in terms of cover artwork and design, annotations, etc. Read Welcome to the Public Domain - Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center You can say someone "owns" a book in the sense that they might have paid for it or it is personal property and one could justifiably call it theft if someone took it from them, but "owning" the physical or electronic copy in any sense doesn't mean you own the copyright. Read the copyright notice on a book or ebook; you get a license to read it, not ownership of it. Read What's the difference between Copyright and Licensing? - Open Source Stack Exchange. Sure, the TOS of a network can specify the ownership/licensing status of the files shared on such network. They will almost all explicitly say not to upload or share anything that will violate the copyright of that work. The TOS of a network could possibly say that anything that is uploaded is automatically licensed to them. A network could demand the reassignment of copyright upon upload, but that would have to be outlined in the TOS and is not simple. See Copyright Ownership and Transfers FAQs - Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center.
You can do it using a US non-profit, but you need a lawyer We know it can be done in the US using a non-profit because it has been done. For example, the Clay Institute’s Millennium Prize does exactly what you propose: it pays people who solve unsolved math problems. Similarly, the the Everglades Foundation used a prize to get people to come up with new ways to get phosphates out of the water sources. To do what they did, you need to follow their lead, and set up and run a non-profit (aka, 501(c)(3), named after the relevant provision of the tax code). Because non-profits are tax exempt under US tax law, you have to apply to the IRS to become a non-profit. Speaking broadly, the IRS imposes two requirements on non-profits: 1) It must serve a charitable purpose; 2) It must spend a certain percentage of its money every year doing charitable work. To set up a foundation you have to specify the charitable purpose you will serve (“encourage research in mathematics”), and have a plan to do so (“we will award a cash prize to people who solve important unsolved problems”). If the IRS decides your plan is genuine, then they give you a pass on paying taxes. To make sure you are carrying out your charitable plan, the IRS requires you to spend a certain percentage of your money each year on charitable work. (This is called the &quot;distribution requirement.&quot;) Meeting the distribution requirement may be a problem, since you may not award prizes every year. You may be able to get a general idea about how the IRS deals with such situations by searching on line. At some point, however, you will probably need to talk to a lawyer with experience setting up non-profits. (FWIW, it looks to me as if the Clay Institute meets its yearly spending requirement by supporting lots of other activities that count towards the spending requirement.) One other problem that it seems you won’t have involves giving prizes directly to individuals. For obvious reasons, the IRS is generally suspicious of prizes given to individuals, so they impose restrictions. For example, for the winner to avoid taxes, the prizes have to be for previous work. Where to go for more information: USA.gov has a nice overview of the application process here. The IRS has several publications and websites that you might find helpful: here, here, here, and here. These cover everything from the general rules to nuts-and-bolts details about which forms to use. You can read more about the IRS treatment of prizes here and here. Depending on how comfortable you are with financial statements, you may learn about how these non-profits work by reading their 990 forms. The Clay Institute's forms are here.
You have several issues. Breach of Contract When you sign up with each of those services you are entering a legally binding contract and must comply with the terms of that contract. For example, this is taken from Facebook's terms: Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account: You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission. You will not create more than one personal account. I haven't checked but its a fair bet that the other services have similar terms. Unless you have permission, what you are doing breaches these terms of service. If what you do causes damage to Facebook et al then they can sue you and your employer for damages. Even if it doesn't they can probably bar you from having an account for as long as they like. Improper use of images This is jurisdictional but it is generally required to have the permission of the subject of a photograph where that photograph is used for commercial gain. There are exceptions where the person is not the primary subject (e.g. crowd shots, or images primarily of something else where the person happens to be in the shot) but the type of photos you would use for these services are not going to be exempt. The sanctions for breaching this will be dependent on jurisdiction. Breach of Copyright Somebody owns the copyright in those photographs. If you do not have a licence to use them in the way you propose then you are breaching their copyright. The copyright holder can sue for damages (if any) and any profits you make. Vicarious Liability An employer is strictly liable for the actions of their employees, jointly and severally with the employee. That means a plaintiff can go after either the employer, the employee or both. An employee may have some statutory or contractual indemnity but this is by no means common.