Work remotely in a EU country for a non EU company I am a German citizen permanently living in Germany. Is it legal to be employed by a company located in Mauritius and work 100% remotely without ever visiting Mauritius?
Under German law, yes sure. As long as you keep to all regulations. You have to declare your taxes. This is income, whether it comes from inside Germany or not and whether it is paid into a German bank account or foreign. You have to have a health insurance and likely need to pay into the social security and pension funds. As your employer most likely does not do this for you as a German employer would be required to, you will need to pay both the employee and the employer's part yourself. So yes, if you pay your taxes on it and have health and social security insurance, Germany does not care where the money comes from. Now whether the company in Mauritius is legally allowed to hire and pay you under their law? I have no idea. Please note that filling out all the right forms correctly is not for the faint of heart. And finding out that you did it wrong only years later is painful and costly. Also calculate your costs before you do anything. Paying both parts for your health insurance for example can easily be up to 400€ a month more then a German employee at a German company, so run your numbers. You may be better off being officially self-employed or even incorporated. Just because it's legal, does not mean it's a good idea. Hire a professional to advise you on the economic and bureaucratic side of this.
Massachusetts is a 'two-party' state. So you'd have to have consent from them to record. You could probably travel to a 'one-party' state such as one of the states listed here and call them while recording. In a one-party state, only one of the parties to the conversation needs to know about the recording. In those states you don't even need to inform them. It would be interesting to see if the law applied to where the call center is located. When calling credit card companies these days, the call may be routed to any number of places depending on call loads, and those places might be out of country as well.
Belgium enacted an implementing law, the Act of 30th July 2018 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data. This, along with the GDPR, are the key legislative references that relate to your question. On 5th September 2017 the ECHR judged that it "considers that States should ensure that, when an employer takes measures to monitor employees' communications, these measures are accompanied by adequate and sufficient safeguards against abuse". This case set a precedent relevant to employee monitoring in Belgium. This is most definitely a data protection or privacy law matter and the DPO should be consulted. If they have to do research, that shouldn't be your concern as that is their job. The company must support the DPO in what they need to do that job, as such is literally written into the GDPR. Furthermore, in this case it would, by my evaluation, be necessary to conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) for the monitoring activity, and if one has been done, it should document the recommendations and requirements or what is already in place. You as an individual may also ask a question of the Data Protection Authority: (NL) https://www.gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be/verzoek-klacht-indienen (FR) https://www.autoriteprotectiondonnees.be/introduire-une-requete-une-plainte You might ask them about your position and liability as an employee, but I would be more concerned, if I were you, with verifying that your actions are above board rather than trying to cover your ass just in case they aren't. Do the right thing, even if that means questioning the direction you've been given. AD logons still identify the person logging on, and may include source IP, which is specifically listed in the GDPR as within the scope of 'personal data'. So while there may be a legitimate need to process such data, it needs to be gone about in the right way. Actions taken by an employee are taken by the organisation in terms of processing personal data, so whatever you are asked or ordered to do, will be done by the company. If you are being offered no legal justification for doing so, you might document the direction you are given and question it respectfully, pointing out that if found to be unlawful, it is the company that would be in trouble, all while knowing that should there be for example an unfair dismissal, you have a record of who asked you to do what, how you challenged or questioned it, and what was the outcome.
The first question is whose law you are concerned with, since in principle you might have violated copyright law in any country, and might be sued under the laws of multiple countries. The US has a concept of "fair use" which is notoriously difficult to apply. When you are sued in the US, you can defend against the allegation by arguing certain things: telegraphically, this includes purpose and character of use, nature of the work, substantiality in relation to the whole, and effect on market. Plus there is a 5th factor to be considered, transformativeness. The court then weighs these factors to decide if the use is "fair". By reading existing case law on the topic (conveniently available from the US Copyright office) you might develop a fact-based opinion of the risk: you would be vastly better off hiring an attorney who specializes in US copyright law to do an analysis for you. Do not hire a programmer to give you legal advice (do not hire an attorney to debug code). You would "fail" on the test of substantiality in that you are copying a highly substantial portion of the original work(s). You would "win" on nature of use (research especially non-profit and commentary are the underlying purposes that drive fair use law). It's not clear how you would fare w.r.t. nature of the work, which is intended to distinguish the extremes "news report" and "literature and artistic work" where copying news is at the fair use end of the spectrum. It is not clear how you would fare on "effect on market", but probably not so badly: are you avoiding some licensing fee? Coupled with the tranformativeness consideration, you are most likely having no effect on the market, since the product that you will distribute is not the original work, but a scientific conclusion about the work. Germany has different laws, and this article would be relevant if you cared about Germany. There was a change in the law that expanded the analog of fair use pertaining to research use. That law allows 15 percent of a work to be reproduced, distributed and made available to the public for the purpose of non-commercial scientific research. That, b.t.w., does not refer to what you are planning to do (unless you also publish quotes); for personal scientific research you may reproduce up to 75 percent. Since this is a new law only a year old, you could become part of the cutting edge in testing the limits of the law. So the standard disclaimer applies: ask your attorney. But note section 60d of the law which legalized data mining, and is squarely on point: (1) In order to enable the automatic analysis of large numbers of works (source material) for scientific research, it shall be permissible to reproduce the source material, including automatically and systematically, in order to create, particularly by means of normalisation, structuring and categorisation, a corpus which can be analysed and to make the corpus available to the public for a specifically limited circle of persons for their joint scientific research, as well as to individual third persons for the purpose of monitoring the quality of scientific research. In such cases, the user may only pursue non-commercial purposes. (2) If database works are used pursuant to subsection (1), this shall constitute customary use in accordance with section 55a, first sentence. If insubstantial parts of databases are used pursuant to subsection (1), this shall be deemed consistent with the normal utilisation of the database and with the legitimate interests of the producer of the database within the meaning of section 87b (1), second sentence, and section 87e. (3) Once the research work has been completed, the corpus and the reproductions of the source material shall be deleted; they may no longer be made available to the public. It shall, however, be permissible to transmit the corpus and the reproductions of the source material to the institutions referred to in sections 60e and 60f for the purpose of long-term storage.
What are our possibilities here? You could be sued for damages in Mexico, the country of origin of the copyright or any of the other signatories of the Berne Convention. You could also be charged with a criminal offence but that is less likely. how much can we get away with? Not a legal question. What you are proposing is illegal - how likely your getaway plan is to work is not for me to say. Is there any advantage on us being on México? No Is there any advantage on picking any either Dragon Ball or League of legends because of the country they are in? No Can they stop us from doing it? Yes
Yes. Art 13 requires you to provide “the identity and the contact details of the controller”. You are the data controller. Your name and address are necessary to establish your identity. Using AdSense means you're offering an internet society service commercially. In that case, there's also probably some EU fair competition directive that was implemented in your countries national law and will provide equivalent requirements. For example, my country Germany has a far-reaching Impressumspflicht. Not sure if this is the most relevant EU law, but Art 22 of Directive 2006/123 requires that your country passed laws to ensure that you make available “the name of the provider, his legal status and form, the geographic address at which he is established and details enabling him to be contacted rapidly and communicated with directly and, as the case may be, by electronic means”. I think you would be in scope of this directive since you're acting commercially. This legally mandated self-doxxing is unfortunate for private bloggers, but it's also essential for making it possible to enforce data subject rights: if you were to violate someone's privacy rights, how could they sue you if they don't know where to serve you with a lawsuit? However, all things are a balancing act. These requirements are not intended to limit freedom of expression. If you're just trying to communicate something to the public without jeopardizing your anonymity, then paradoxically social media services can be more attractive.
On the first page of https://www.gov.uk/duty-free-goods/overview you find: "You can bring some goods from abroad without having to pay UK tax or ‘duty’ (customs charges), as long as they’re for your own use." And on the next page "... will use them yourself or give them away as a gift". This clearly doesn't cover anything that you bring into the UK to sell it. And a bit further on the site it says "You must tell customs (known as ‘declaring’) on arrival in the UK if you have goods: ... that you plan to sell". Since you are asking here, it is quite obvious that you intend to sell :-) You said "e.g. say this guys comes every month from Russia to France for unrelated business, each time he fills up his luggage with the maximum allowed amount of goods that comply with custom laws". If this guy sells the stuff to you, then the maximum allowed amount of goods to import without paying taxes is zero. Once he is willing to pay taxes, there is no limit. Obviously regularly importing things from Russia or France and selling in the UK at a profit means that he is running a business in the UK, which means he would have to register a business, pay corporation taxes etc. It's all a matter of degree; for small amounts nobody cares (up to some limit you don't need to register a business or pay taxes; I don't know the details).
Say I build myself a faraday cage/wave screen around my house, potentially resulting in poor nework coverage for my neighbours. Questions about land property and constructing permits apart, can I be sued for that? By the network operator? by the neighbours? In most countries, the use of the radio spectrum is regulated (who may send what on which frequency, at which power, etc.). As part of these regulations it is usually forbidden to interfere with the reception of radio waves. So if what you do causes your neighbours to have reception problems, then yes, that will most likely be illegal. In France, the government agency responsible for these problems is ARCEP (Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes). If someone notices reception problems, they can complain to ARCEP, as explained for example on the page Le traitement des plaintes en brouillage ("Handling of complaints about jamming"). While you will probably not go to prision for jamming reception, you could have to pay a significant fine. This article on cell phone jamming mentions a penalty of "up to six months in prison or a 30,000 € fine" for "selling or installing" a cell phone jammer. In addition to that, anyone harmed by the reception problems could sue you in civil court and try to collect financial damages (how much that would be will be up to a judge to decide). That said, note that a faraday cage around your house should not hinder reception outside your house. A faraday cage only influences reception inside the cage, not outside. However, that is off-topic here :-).