Does cascade of ownership indicate ownership? Does cascade of ownership indicate ownership? Person A owns 100% shares of a business entity B. Business entity B owns a business entity C. Business entity C owns a house D. Two questions please: Does the person A own house D, in legal terms? Can the person A live in the house D without a rental contract from the business entity C? Thank you.
Likely not, unless A finds a jurisdiction with sufficiently lax accounting and taxation standards. As described in the question, A, B, and C are distinct legal entitites. For each entity, the tax office would want to know what the revenue, expenses, and net income are. By providing a service (use of the house) free of charge between two entites of the shell construct, profits are moved from C to A. This is usually illegal. The required paperwork might not have to look like a normal rental contract between a tenant and a landlord, since many questions are resolved by the ownership, but it would have to specify payments. The tax office should complain if they differ too much from the going market rate. Consider that C might be a LLC, and that C might be a civil judgement against C. Someone would look at the assets owned by C, and that includes the house D.
Not a lawyer, but: In many countries, a purchased item is your property once you removed it from the premises of the seller. In practice, this rarely makes a difference. You have entered a contract with the seller where the seller has to deliver the product, and you have to pay the money, you did your part, they have to do their part. There would be a difference if the item was stolen while in the store, or damaged by fire, or if the store went bankrupt and bailiffs took the item. If these rules apply in your country, then what they did is not theft, otherwise it would be theft (in all countries, if the store removed the door from your home after it is installed, that would be theft). You paid for a door, the store owes you a door. You have a legal contract. Both sides are bound by that legal contract. They have to do what the contract says (delivering the door that was displayed in the store), if they can't, then they have to do the nearest thing that isn't to your disadvantage, like delivering a new door. Or possible a different door that was on display. They can't just declare your contract invalid because it suits them better. That wouldn't be the case if this would put the store at an unacceptable disadvantage. For example, if thieves had broken into the store and stolen ten doors, including yours, the store might get away with returning your money. Since they intentionally sold your door again to someone else, I don't think they could use this as an excuse. I'd go once more to the store and ask them whether they want to deliver a door to you, according to your contract with the store, or if they want you to get a lawyer. A letter from a lawyer might work wonders. (Or of course the lawyer might tell you that I'm completely wrong, but they don't know that, so telling them that you will hire a lawyer might be enough).
The part about "If I'm the owner of the content, surely I have the right to request its deletion" is the problem. Sure, you have the right to request, but you can't legally compel. You have an agreement with them, according to which you got something, and they got something. You can't then take back the thing that you gave them, which is permission to use. You didn't give them the IP itself, which you still hold. Here's an analogy. You may own a car, and can give a person permission to use the car (let's say "if you bring me back a pound of cheese from the store"). You cannot later change your mind (especially after you've gotten the cheese) a say that you retract that permission and therefore they actually stole your car. When permission to use is given, as long as the conditions for granting permission are satisfied, you can't un-give permission.
Most limited liability companies (LLCs) are small, closely held firms that are owned entirely or in substantial part by active employee-manager-owners with modest capital contributions. LLCs with large numbers of owners typically have a large share of non-employee investor ownership and are most common in oil and gas firms and in real estate firms that either develop, or buy and hold, real estate. Most large accounting and law firms and many other professional service firms are organized as LLCs or LLP (limited liability partnerships), which are owned by the senior employees whose contributions as employees dwarfs their contributions as investors. (Non-lawyers and non-physicians aren't allowed to have ownership interests in law firms and medical practices, respectively). These are the largest firms in the world with significant employee ownership. Start up tech firms organized as LLCs also often give equity stakes to employees even below the senior-managerial employee level. Rank and file employees are sometimes given an ownership interests in firms, but this is more commonly done through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) or certain other tax encouraged mechanisms for employee ownership in corporations (e.g., incentive stock options), or in the context of a firm organized as a cooperative (which is taxed essentially like a C-corporation but with an entity level deduction for cooperative dividends paid to members), than it is as an LLCs. One important reason for this is that pass-through taxation (which applies to LLCs not electing to be taxed as corporations) is not workable as a means of imparting ownership to large numbers of rank and file workers, because the compliance paperwork of sending out dozens or hundreds of K-1s to these workers is daunting, and because the prospect of a disconnect between allocated income and loss, and actual distributions (e.g. taxation on &quot;phantom income&quot; of the entity that is not distributed) is problematic.
It is certainly possible to incorporate companies with the same name in two different states. If neither company does business in the other person's state under that name, it isn't actionable for either company. If one company was already doing business under its name in a state where another company is formed under that name, it would usually be possible to force the new company to cease and desist from using that name, either with an action directed at the infringer and the Secretary of State (or other official charged with business incorporations in a state) of that state, or in an action directly against the infringer alone. Also, even if a trademark isn't formally registered, it can arise at common law simply through use of a name in a particular market in a particular place. This is harder to prove and the remedies for violating a common law trademark a more limited, but it is not entirely unenforceable.
Basically, "in the course of your employment" means "while you are working, or should be working, for the employer". If you're not using company resources or time to create or acquire the works in question, and the works are unrelated to company business, they're quite unlikely to become the company's property. (Particularly since the company almost certainly doesn't have an interest in controlling the distribution of your vacation photos.) When you let your personal side projects and the company's stuff get intertwined, that's where the troubles begin. Works made on company time, or using company resources, or to do company-related things, may be claimed by the company, and this agreement basically says you'll cede ownership of the works to them, patents and all, for whatever amount of money they decide it's worth paying you.
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.
what responsibilities/liabilities does/will his company have given that it's in possession of my property? None. There is no contract (implicit or otherwise) between the owner and you. The owner receives no consideration from you in exchange for storing your goods, and an essential element of contracts is an exchange of considerations. Thus, he has no obligation to continue storing your goods. Another essential element in contract law is that the agreement --meaning the conditions thereof-- be entered knowingly and willfully. Since the time of making the arrangement and up to now, you were reasonably unaware of the likelihood of an obligation to pay the owner. This preempts the owner's right to start billing you. If anything, you would need to prove special circumstances to avail yourself of a viable claim of promissory estoppel. See Havens v. C &amp; D Plastics, Inc., 124 Wn.2d 158, 171-172 (1994): To obtain recovery in promissory estoppel, plaintiff must establish (1) [a] promise which (2) the promisor should reasonably expect to cause the promisee to change his position and (3) which does cause the promisee to change his position (4) justifiably relying upon the promise, in such a manner that (5) injustice can be avoided only by enforcement of the promise. However, the viability and duration of any relief pursuant to promissory estoppel seems very unlikely in the situation you describe. The hardship you are undergoing --and which prompted you to store your goods there-- is unfortunate. But generally speaking, a third party (such as the owner) who is unrelated to the causation or prolongation of that hardship cannot be lawfully forced to aid you for free.