California Flexible Purpose and Benefit Corporations
Enacted in October 2011 and effective today, January 1, 2012, Corporations Code Section 2500 et seq. and Section 14600 et seq. create two new types of business entities, the flexible purpose corporation and the benefit corporation. Both allow the organization of corporations which are, while not non-profit, encompass both economic profit, as well as social welfare, objectives. In short, these are hybrids between traditional for-profit corporations, and traditional nonprofits. Or, if you prefer, socially conscious stock corporations.
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More seriously: there are plenty of "ethical certification" thingies, and lots of finance entities who only work with "ethical" products.
This things just don't seem to have trickled down from (arguably) major evils businesses (child exploitation, war profits, environmental disruption etc) to lesser ones (predatory pricing, patent trolling, exclusive dealing etc).
Possibly a matter of time, but a long one IMVHO.
I think the best way to tackle this would be defining specific tenets the way that the FSF does with freedoms 0-4. They don't just say "You have to be free!" ... there is the legally-binding license itself, containing some light legalese, as well as the 4 freedoms specifying the idea to the common man, despite clearly.
So, a license that comprises "We won't be evil. We promise!" wouldn't be good enough, but the some clear rules could be set. The non-evil most people would care about would probably be related to privacy.
I agree that specifying all of the business practices which many people believe are evil would be a non-trivial task dependent on the nature of the company.
Think about it, if for example Google had a 'We're Legally bound to never be evil' eithical rule.
Does such a thing already exist perhaps? Or is there some wierdness that prevent it from happening?