I don't know how this can be legal at all, the liabilities are against the company and not the owners - and nothing changed about the company. When they purchased the company, it's name/trademark, the customer base, software, etc, they also purchased the liabilities. The only way I can think you can avoid purchasing the liabilities is to go into bankruptcy.
If this is allowed to sit, then any small/medium tech company could promise the world to their customers, then just "sell" the company to a family member without the "liabilities" and there would be no recourse.
That all said, I'm launching my new company "infinite money glitch". For 0.1 BTC for a life time subscription we'll send you 0.01 BTC back every month. Don't worry about the sale of the company planned in a few months to my cousin, trust me bro.
I think what interests me the most about this is what exactly is the cause of the liability here, assuming that the product name and company entity wasn't sold off to the current owner.
Is it the customer database?
Is it the IP / domain of the server?
Is it the website that promised it and hosted the contract?
Is it the ownership of the app code rights?
Because if you think more about it, there is some potential gap here in copyleft licenses which might need to be fixed to protect projects against companies abusing this methodology.
Should we tie liabilities to contracts therefore to customer data instead of apps and codes of apps? Is this a glitch in the democratic law that needs to be fixed by the legislatives?
In European law liabilities are tied to the legal entities, meaning that there is a transitioning phase of 5 years of the liquidation process until an entity can be sold off by the liquidator, and within that time frame customers must file their complaints/liabilities against the legal entity if e.g. they want their money back. That is unless a judicative / court decides otherwise and puts responsibility onto the owners if there is illegal ownership behavior (e.g. fraud) that was provable.
It's not just the domain, trademarks, code, database, etc, but also the customers and their contracts (accept the ones they didn't want). I think in a court it could easily be argued that it was a purchase of the company by a different name.
And their argument is that they were not made aware of these contracts, which to me sounds like the new owners should be suing the old owners for lack of responsible disclosure. Unless of course they signed away this right as part of the contract, or they were aware and don't have a leg to stand on.
> If this is allowed to sit, then any small/medium tech company could promise the world to their customers, then just "sell" the company to a family member without the "liabilities" and there would be no recourse.
Yes, this is very likely the outcome. It will just be another perk in the consequence-free world of corporate governance.
If this is allowed to sit, then any small/medium tech company could promise the world to their customers, then just "sell" the company to a family member without the "liabilities" and there would be no recourse.
That all said, I'm launching my new company "infinite money glitch". For 0.1 BTC for a life time subscription we'll send you 0.01 BTC back every month. Don't worry about the sale of the company planned in a few months to my cousin, trust me bro.