FishFace

Well not allowing it is just an inconvenience, as I said, so it’s really a benefit for the accountants in this comparison. But if you’re saying that has a big effect on discouraging the harmful form of ownership, the innocuous forms would be discouraged as well. That means also companies would be less likely to merge at all (regardless of resulting struxture) which would be unhealthy for the economy as it prevents synergising. But for the record I don’t think it would have a massive effect on either case.

Same way it makes this negative thing more inconvenient - there are legit reasons for a company to own another one, because it basically just helps organisation and accounting.

But it will also make legit things slightly less convenient.

If buying a company is illegal, there’s still no (practical) way to prevent the buying company say, “we’ll put you in your own separate Bioware team, no management changes for at least a year, we’ll hire anyone who wants to come over” etc. Basically, you’d have the exact same situation practically, just the legal bollocks would be different and it’d be slightly less convenient.

But it wouldn’t prevent them from buying the IP. The only thing that solves the problem is preventing ip from changing hands, but that would definitely cause problems

That would solve nothing.