"Why the difference is significant:
• One can be a B Corps and yet be incorporated legally as a C corporation, an LLC, even a sole proprietorship. In other words, a company can be certified as a B Corps without ever incorporating as a benefit corporation
• One can be a benefit corporation under Maryland law without being a B Corps. The Maryland law does not require that benefit corporations be certified as B Corps. Rather, it requires that benefit corporations’ social and environmental performance be assessed by an independent third party that makes publicly available or accessible the following information:
1. The factors considered when measuring the performance of a business;
2. The relative weightings of those factors; and
3. The identity of the persons who developed and control changes to the standard and the process by which those changes were made."
>> On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Michel Bauwens <michel@p2pfoundation.net> wrote:The 5-year sage of Couchsurfing purposely misinforming the community continues:
>>> thanks Robin ...
>>>
>>> in theory, a B Corporation is not such a bad thing, no, as it is and remains
>>> dedicated to a social good?
>>>
>>
>> I don't know. I haven't researched much into this B-corp thing.
>
> Though there is something interesting here in my opinion, which is
> that CS will be employee-owned. But how this will relate to
> voting-power we don't know yet.
>
> The employees will have more voting power than the two investors, but
> how the division will be and how much they can vote for (if it is only
> the board or example) is publicly unkown.
>
> And we don't know either how the shares are distributed among the
> employees (equally among employees or not, etc).
>
> As always has been the case with Couchsurfing, there is more we don't
> know than what we do know :s
Couchsurfing: "This structure legally allows us to put our ideals
before our profits."
(try to read that sentence again).
And yet Couchsurfing is not even a registered Benefit Corp
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcorp), but still a normal C-corporation
http://www.bcorporation.net/index.cfm/fuseaction/company.report/ID/5e086197-f44e-4448-9519-5e35d5bde1e2
Corporate Structure: C Corporation
Ownership: Private
See als: B Corps is Not a New Legal Form
http://charitylawyerblog.com/2011/01/15/b-corps-is-not-a-new-legal-form-by-keren-g-raz/
See also the discussion on the CS-group
http://www.couchsurfing.org/group_read.html?gid=45507&post=10059584
Robin.
--
Life happens at the level of events, not of words
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