Government laws are irrelevant when it comes to scammer tags. Show me the contract where I agreed to take on any liability related to GLBSE or BitcoinGlobal. The bylaws don't mention it.
Without a contract transferring liability, each shareholder is only liable (morally, perhaps not legally) for what he personally did. If a corporation consists of one person and that corporation scams someone, that person is liable, regardless of whether the law limits his liability. If a corporation is run purely by majority vote and the shareholders vote to scam someone, only those people who voted to scam and the people who carried out the scam are liable; the other people have not agreed to take on any liability just by being members of the corporation (unless this actually was explicitly agreed to in a contract).
Well that is why making up these "quasi pretendo companies" is not a good idea. If it was actually a general partnership then yes all partners are equally and fully liable. If it was a limited partnership then the non-active (passive) partners would have limited liability while the general partner (Nefaro?) would have unlimited liability. Of course that would require a partnership agreement and partnerships don't have shares, stock, or shareholders. It is almost like Nefaro took the worst aspects of a partnership, sole proprietorship, limited liability company, and corporation and turned it into some franken-company (and yes I use that term loosely).
Maybe that is the lesson in all this. Forming a real legal entity is trivial these days and cost a nominal amount of money. It then lets us answer questions like the above and prevents any ambiguity. Everyone getting involved knows exactly what they are getting involved in. I mean how many of these "partner-shareholders" made up nonsense realized that under a partnership they have unlimited personal liability (i.e. you can lose everything you own, your house, your car, all your assets, the money from your bank account, and even the clothes from your closets)? All the limitations of a shareholder with all the liability of a general partner. Yeah that is a match made in heaven.
I prefer not to deal with governments if at all possible. The bylaws are ambiguous and deficient in many areas, but that could be fixed without registering with a government.
Things should have been set up like they are on this forum, where even several powerful people gone mad can't take down the whole service. But I didn't put much thought into GLBSE. I only have a 3.3% share in BitcoinGlobal, the treasury work itself took only an hour or two per month, and it was not my job to deal with any day-to-day operations, so I didn't have any reason to think deeply about GLBSE security/stability.
