Title: Private property and the modern corporation in the third millennium: Google's SOS to the SEC

Authors: Abraham J. Briloff, Leonore A. Briloff

Addresses: 274 Madison Avenue Suite 1600, New York, NY 10016, USA. ' 274 Madison Avenue Suite 1600, New York, NY 10016, USA

Abstract: |Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken| (John Keats). In 1932, Professors Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property. In that seminal work, the professors described the alienation of power over property by executives and corporate management from the putative owners of that property, i.e., the shareholders. Berle updated that theme in 1959 in his Power without Property. Back then, property was presumed to be essentially bricks and mortar or other tangibles. There were some intangibles, generally involving copyrights, patents or other identifiable contractual rights, e.g., leaseholds. But that notion of property has been transmuted in this third millennium, an era which I have dubbed that of the |four I|s| – the internet, intangibles, intellectual property and information.

Keywords: Google; Securities and Exchange Commission; SEC; intangibles; Berle and Means; intellectual property; information; private property; internet; world wide web; www; executives; corporate management; shareholders; corporations.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEA.2010.033900

International Journal of Economics and Accounting, 2010 Vol.1 No.1/2, pp.46 - 52

Published online: 03 Jul 2010 *

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