You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with the cash (via The Onion's cash offer and structuring the payout).

Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars).

> It was basically an IOU from one of the families

This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.

> There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.

This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.

It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.

> There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.

Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.

Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.

The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.

The exception to this is currency: if you're fairly paid with stolen money, you get to keep the money, regardless of whether the rightful owner is able to proof that it was originally theirs and stolen.

These nominal agreements are significantly less flexible than real-valued ones; people are much more able to buy fewer steak dinners when they're $20 instead of $15, and much less able to stay in their house when their paycheck is $1500 instead of $2000.

Fusion, on the other hand, requires you to get center-of-sun temperatures and pressures going on to work properly. That usually requires either extremely difficult engineering processes or a fission bomb (and more precise engineering calculations but they're actually reasonably solvable).

The US has the "work for hire" concept - if an employee creates work as part of their regular duties, their employer is considered both the author and the copyright owner.

For example, if you have employees take photographs of finished products, using company devices, on company time, and as part of their assigned duties, there is essentially zero question that the copyright owner of those photographs is the employer, regardless of whether this is explicitly lined out in an employment agreement.

The employment agreement definitely helps in that it preempts most disputes over what the employer's expectations are, but it is by no means necessary.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf

The correct way to handle this is to get ahold of the CTO or a relevant subordinate in their department, and inform them of the shadow-IT situation going on at the warehouse. Most risk-adverse IT executives would have a conniption at the idea that work policies are enacted by business logic code that zero employees understand and can modify.