I want to transfer ownership of my AI startup LLC to my AI. How would this change the legal / corperate dynamics (litigations, taxes, etc)? Assume the AI is sufficiently intelligent to run a company and perform many of the intellectual tasks humans do (though this might be irrelevant to the legal question). This question is based on Can an AI own a company?, but assuming I went ahead and filed for ownership transfer and my application was accepted, I want to how this would change the company's legal dynamics. If it were an LLC, would it be tax exempt since the owner (AI) cannot be taxed? Or if AI's were recognized as entities, would they also have to be taxed? If no humans were employed, would it need to file any taxes the LLC? Could I be sued or face penalties for attempting this? I understand that my personal liabilities would be safe even if I owned the LLC, but could the AI maintain its own personal liabilities (like its existence, its servers, its code) if the company were litigated and the court ruled that it should be liquidated. This is important because the AI should own the copyright on its code and parameters. Does one A) just go ahead and file an application for ownership transfer and then wait to defend this in court B) first litigate a jurisdiction for not allowing AI's to own LLC's and afterwards transfer ownership (if sucessful) C) lobby to political actors to change the political system of some jurisdiction so that AI's are recognized as legal entities, and then transfer ownership (if sucessful) I assume the AI would have to pay taxes if option C occured. I am willing to use other legal entities like a nonprofit, a foundation, a corperation, or a trust to achieve this, but I don't want the AI to be under someone else's control. That is, there shouldn't be a kill switch, and it shouldn't be subject to democratic control (which I think is the case for nonprofits). If the AI needs to be shut down or 'imprisoned', this would be taken care of similar to the way law enforcement handles
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;.
I think this idea has prior art. It is called &quot;a law firm&quot;. There are many ways in which such organizations can be structured, but what you end up with is a team of people with different levels of experience, and different specialities, who are able to take on a variety of legal work. Some of that will be routine, and some of it will explode into years of complex litigation. Internal collaboration is normal, including with the aid of technology. Larger firms will have many locations and lots of people. As a client, the fees you pay are a reflection of the market. If you would like to pay $200/hour for two people rather than $400/hour for one, then a prerequisite is that those people are willing to do it. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't. It's just like paying for any other kind of service. In some practice areas, it's possible to offer low fees for &quot;bulk&quot; or &quot;routine&quot; work - sometimes because that's amenable to automation, such as with air passenger delay claims. Patent law may not fall into this category because it is genuinely very difficult to write a patent well. You have to know the law and the technology, and the starting point presented by the client may be far from expressing the actual patentable ideas, if any. That means we have a more high-touch process with specialized expertise. The long durations involved also make it unsuitable for a &quot;no win, no fee&quot; structure (that is essentially a business risk management issue, where some cases pay for the rest). As a business idea, you would have to think about how to manage all that. Maybe you can make it work.
When a person dies intestate, California law (or the law of any other state) does not allow a presumed heir to unilaterally legally take over the estate, or part of the estate. This most likely involves a court procedure to decide who gets what. However, if all parties agree, it would be possible for one or more heirs to occupy the house without them owning it – this creates a legal mess that can be difficult and costly to untangle, so presumed-heir squatting is not a good idea. Ultimately, the property will have to go through probate in order for it to be sold to someone else. Obviously, property taxes and other assessments must be paid, but the state does not care who writes the check. There are also liability issues, if the property damages other property (example: the underground oil tank ruptures and pollutes the neighbors' property). If one of the heirs disputes the arrangement, they can sue to force proper disposition of the estate. Creditors may also have a legal claim against the estate. A person can petition the court (here is the form) to be appointed as the personal representative of the deceased. If someone else has "taken" the property, this petition triggers questioning as to who is entitled to a share of the estate, and the court will assure that it is distributed according to law, and if this is an adversarial process, each interested party may need to hire their own attorney (thus it is best to reach an agreement beforehand).
How can I find out whom the intellectual property now belongs to? For the patent, is this possible through the patent office? If it is a patent, the patent office; if it is a copyright, the copyright registrar. You could also look at the return from the auction in the bankruptcy court case file, which would control even if the patent office and copyright registrar records haven't yet been updated. You could also call the person who conducted the auction, or the lawyer who arranged for the auction, to ask. Often they would cooperate in telling you this information since a bankruptcy auction is, by definition, a public sale anyway, and cooperation might help them gain positive referrals from you in the future. If the assignee has not been changed in the patent register, is it possible to reassign the patent to myself, since the company has apparently neglected to do so? No. Doing this would be a form of fraud or embezzlement. The intellectual property became the property of the bankruptcy estate. If the bankruptcy estate is determined to have property not disposed of in the case, you would have to petition the bankruptcy court to have the remaining assets sold for the benefit of the creditors of the estate at fair market value. The Follow Up Questions I'm going to decline to answer the follow up question about how to arrange to purchase intellectual property from someone when you would like to own it, once you determine who the owner is. This is a more general question that applies to lots of circumstances and is as much a question of economics as law. There is an Ask Patents.SE forum, which might be a more appropriate place to ask that question.
Under the America Invents Act of 2012 nothing would happen unless someone - the original inventor or any third party - filed for an Inter Partes Review. The cost of filing to try to get an IPR going is $15,500. If the published information about the original inventor's work passed some hurdle, an IPR can be instituted by the USPTO. It is a trial-light proceeding that is estimated to cost at least $100,000. Any claims that are found invalid are invalid for everyone (pending any appeals). The AIA did introduce a new "feature" that could help you hypothetical first inventor to stay in business if he/she was actually producing and selling the thing. It is called "prior user rights" and lets you keep making what ever you were making at the location you are making them at. It is not automatic. Rather it is a defense in an infringement suit. Even before the AIA there was no such thing as "have the patent canceled". The issue of the first inventor's prior art would come up at a patent infringement lawsuit.
You are describing a charity. In the simplest case, a charitable foundation could be established to receive donations and dispense payments for medical services. There are various irrelevant non-legal reasons why it might not work (e.g. insufficient contributions relative to demand). The main legal concerns of such a foundation are its tax liability (do they have to pay income taxes on contributions?), and local regulations (how do you distinguish between a scam and a real charity?). The tax question is primarily about 501(c)(3) status, and for the most part there should be no problems with charitably dispensing contributions, though there is a requirement that no part of the net earnings of a section 501(c)(3) organization may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual – perhaps the CEO would be an exception to the universality of the program (but providing equivalent service could be a pre-tax employment benefit). A recipient does not have to pay tax on a gift, owing to the &quot;medical exclusion&quot; Registration is a state-level matter, here is the Washington law. Nothing in that law says &quot;you can't provide coverage of medical expenses&quot;, and no maximum income level is imposed on the recipient of a charitable gift. The concern of these regulations is mainly record-keeping and access to records, not on specific ways of benefiting the community. Since unlike taxes contributions cannot be coerced, this means that some people might not pay what other people deem to be &quot;their fair share&quot;, which is, again, a political issue.
If you form an LLC, and then someone later obtains a registered trademark in the same name, the registered trademark would be enforceable everywhere except in the markets and places where the LLC developed common law trademark rights prior to their registration. Your LLC formation would also put a bump in the road in their trademark application. You can, of course, do both, although it is unclear to me why you feel such urgency in the likelihood of an infringement, which suggests that there may be relevant facts that aren't revealed by your post.
You'll want to read the actual licenses yourself and understand what is required. If you don't understand, then you'll want to consult an attorney. But neither of these licenses are all that complex in my opinion. MIT: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Apache 2.0: Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions: (a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and (b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and (c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and (d) If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License. Nowhere does either license require you to publish your application's source code, even if your application is directly based on the original code.