maybe not 'all' but might explain some of it if it is true

well this sucks. Most of users donated quite a lot.If this is true that is. I disliked the way they did this.

What makes me sad is not too long ago someone gave me a ton of currency to play with....I never really got the chance to play with it. -le sigh-

I was so happy too. I had just made like 50k from the event too. I was saving it up to buy something big and shiny.

and I was thinking of becoming active again.

I was a bad panda. I was really active during the event, but then I became inactive once the event was over. But I am pretty sure that my activity or lack thereof had nothing to do with the site closing.

I know this is kind of random, but I wonder who got the rights to ernya once they got divorced. Because once you get divorced, don't the assets get split?

might be neither unless one offers it up, it's a legal thing because of taxes

I think Emy would have gotten it but Prez was the only one I saw on as it was going down D:

You know I am a romantic at heart. One moment they are happy and in love. Next thing you know, they are divorced and dating and marrying other people. O.O

During my time there, I did not know a lot of what went on behind the scenes. It's only coming to light for me now that it's all over and people are trying to make sense of what happened. I've had to piece together all of the information to get even a vague idea of what happened.

Besides Alexia's post which I copied above, I've had to read through pages of conversation to get that Emy was floundering.

I'm wondering if there was just too much and she felt overwhelmed. In the end, she's only human - and though I wish she had asked for help from her staff, she did what she did.

I hold no ill will towards her. I hope she's happy and that the witch hunt doesn't effect her too badly. =/

I wasn't a part of Ernya so I don't know anything about the owners, but I know a bit about splitting assets.

I would assume that Ernya would be registered as a company, a separate entity than the individuals, for tax purposes. This makes it (legally) easier to determine what happens to the company in case of divorce. Simply, the company stays as it is. If only one person is the legal owner of the company, then it stays with that person. If they both legally own 50% of the company, then that also stays the same. You don't have to be married to somebody to own a business with them!

The tricky part comes in if/when they each own 50% of the company and want to have nothing at all to do with each other. This is where you start working with lawyers to work out a buyout of the other person's stake in the company. It gets messy if both people want full ownership. The situation would be the same as if you simply had a falling out with your business partner and no longer wanted to work together. But plus potential emotional baggage, spite, revenge, et cetera that makes it difficult to negotiate.

THIS IS JUST A GUESS but I suppose that it's completely possible that a buyout agreement could not be reached, so the company was dissolved and the assets split. I don't have experience working with lawyers in that capacity, but the sudden shutdown and the hush-hush could have lawyer reasoning.

I'm sure Coda will correct me if I've got any bits wrong, since Coda knows everything. :P

Coda doesn't know EVERYTHING, but Coda was heavily involved with figuring out Trisphee's legal/tax status, so Coda is well-acquainted with the relevant stuff.

It's ENTIRELY possible that things shut down abruptly BECAUSE of legal status limbo. While it's possible to operate a sole proprietorship with a minimum of legal documentation, a business acting as a partnership has to have legal documents on file, including getting an employer ID / tax permit. If the Ernya administration never formalized anything, it's likely that the law treated it as a sole proprietorship in the name of whoever was responsible for filing their joint tax return.

You can imagine how the divorce proceedings would bring up a lot of icky legal matters of ownership at that point -- ownership is already a messy matter in divorce cases, and now you've got everything that the business itself owns legally belonging to whoever the law said was the official sole proprietor. If they asserted that they were actually independent assets belonging to a business they never actually filed to create... well... their lawyers very well might have said to shut things down before they get in real legal trouble, or there might have been a threat of a lawsuit between the two parties.

If the business was a properly-filed partnership, then its existence would have survived the divorce with no ill effects (legally speaking). This doesn't result in the icky lawyer-says-that's-illegal what-do-you-mean-the-business-never-existed scenario, but if the business itself were dissolved at the same time as the marriage was, that would require the business to divest of its assets (since it can't own anything if it doesn't exist anymore), and a shutdown would have been the easiest way to liquidate any ownership interest in the site's hosting contract.

A final option would have been one party unilaterally leaving the business ("I quit, and you can't stop me!") and the remaining owner would be saddled with all further liability for the assets. I don't know just how legal this actually is if it was a partnership, but it's a pretty ugly mess.

From what I'm reading, legally, partnerships are the same as sole proprietorships....when it comes to paperwork and liability. So that wouldn't have been a problem. Except their country/state may have different laws.

Here, a partnership is a soleproprietorship just with two people instead of one....and if the business is sued, they can go after one, the others, or both for restitution. It's up to the person suing. -random information-

Unless someone makes a statement - either Pez and Emy - it will all remain somewhat unknown. =\

When it comes to liability, yes. When it comes to paperwork, no. You can run a sole proprietorship without filing any paperwork beyond a Schedule C with your taxes.

If they had never filed any paperwork, then there's no partnership with which to own or divest assets. That does imply the part about who to sue that you brought up, but it also implies complications (which could result in a lawsuit in and of itself -- a divorce is, itself, such a suit) pertaining to who actually owns what when the partners disagree.

Hmm, this is definitely an interesting topic.

I never really thought about the legal aspect of owning a server.

Business Partners. Legal Ownership. Assets. Paperwork. Taxes.