Is it legal for companies to pay salaries or bonuses as lootboxes? The South Korean branch of video game publisher Nexon made headlines online when it gave out a small bonus to its employees in the form of lootboxes. A monthly bonus coupon was given in August 2020 to employees. The employees would type a keyword in a chatbot to activate the coupon, which would add a random amount between 2000 and 100000 points to one's balance. Is giving out bonuses as lootboxes or any other way that relies on pure luck rather than my achievements in work legal in other jurisdictions? Would the legality be different if it were salaries and not bonuses that were given out this way?
germany Is it legal for companies to pay salaries or bonuses as lootboxes? The German &quot;Gewerbeordnung&quot; says: § 107 Berechnung und Zahlung des Arbeitsentgelts Das Arbeitsentgelt ist in Euro zu berechnen und auszuzahlen. Arbeitgeber und Arbeitnehmer können Sachbezüge als Teil des Arbeitsentgelts vereinbaren, wenn dies dem Interesse des Arbeitnehmers oder der Eigenart des Arbeitsverhältnisses entspricht. Der Arbeitgeber darf dem Arbeitnehmer keine Waren auf Kredit überlassen. Er darf ihm nach Vereinbarung Waren in Anrechnung auf das Arbeitsentgelt überlassen, wenn die Anrechnung zu den durchschnittlichen Selbstkosten erfolgt. Die geleisteten Gegenstände müssen mittlerer Art und Güte sein, soweit nicht ausdrücklich eine andere Vereinbarung getroffen worden ist. Der Wert der vereinbarten Sachbezüge oder die Anrechnung der überlassenen Waren auf das Arbeitsentgelt darf die Höhe des pfändbaren Teils des Arbeitsentgelts nicht übersteigen. Die Zahlung eines regelmäßigen Arbeitsentgelts kann nicht für die Fälle ausgeschlossen werden, in denen der Arbeitnehmer für seine Tätigkeit von Dritten ein Trinkgeld erhält. Trinkgeld ist ein Geldbetrag, den ein Dritter ohne rechtliche Verpflichtung dem Arbeitnehmer zusätzlich zu einer dem Arbeitgeber geschuldeten Leistung zahlt. Source Translation: § 107 Calculation and payment of remuneration Remuneration shall be calculated and paid in euros. Employer and employee may agree on benefits in kind as part of the remuneration if this is in the interest of the employee or in accordance with the nature of the employment relationship. The employer may not provide the employee with goods on credit. The employer may, by agreement, provide the employee with goods as a credit against the employee's remuneration, provided that the goods are provided at the average cost price. The goods provided must be of average type and quality unless expressly agreed otherwise. The value of the agreed benefits in kind or the crediting of the goods provided against the remuneration may not exceed the amount of the attachable part of the remuneration. The payment of regular remuneration may not be excluded in cases where the employee receives a tip from a third party for his work. A tip is an amount of money paid by a third party to the employee without a legal obligation in addition to a service owed to the employer. What does that mean? The base Salary can never be paid in anything but Euros. Makes sense, how would you determine whether 2 apples, an egg and a parttime timeshare of a camel each month are above or below the minimum wage? How would the employee pay their own costs from that, even it it were worth more? Taxes would be a nightmare. Good luck to the Ex-Wife and kid, getting half an apple and a stinky camel timeshare for a day as alimony. No, money is there for a reason. Benefits like bonuses or additional agreements on top of your basic salary can be goods of other kinds. Loot boxes for example. Please note that the employee has to explicitely agree on that. I will assume getting an additional lootbox on top for free is something an employee can agree on without a second thought. Getting parts of your salary normally paid in Euros or bonus normally paid in Euros as Lootboxes would be something the employee would have to explicitely agree to, otherwise it must be Euros. You cannot &quot;force&quot; an employee to accept anything but Euros. Note the sentence that the employer can give the employee goods instead of Euros not for their made up &quot;sale&quot; price, but for the cost of making them. So for no profit. You could pay someone partially in loot boxes, but since a loot box costs about 0,01€ to make (electricity, database maintenance, the developer who has to press the button once a month), that would be a lot of loot boxes to pay a part of the salary. And yes, even &quot;goods&quot; will be taxed. They are part of your income. So if you get a &quot;lootbox&quot;, be preprared to pay taxes on that. If you don't play the game, paying taxes on something you don't use might not be worth it after all. It is well known that companies have employee-only pricing schemes. For example you will find that employees of automobile manufacturers will drive their brands cars, because getting a good price on a car is a big deal. Some companies allow private use of company cars for the employees that work &quot;in the field&quot;. But it is very rare that employees get actual goods monthly as part of their salary in Germany. But there is no mention of &quot;luck&quot; anywhere in the law. Assuming the employee knows about the &quot;luck&quot; factor and explicitely agrees to have that as part of their remuneration, then everything is fine.
A company generally cannot compel an employee to agree to a non-compete, but they have a wide variety of alternatives for inducing employees to do so. Most obviously, they may threaten to fire employees who refuse, whether immediately or at the end of their current term, as another answer observes. Indeed, if Big Company makes an NC a condition of employment then they are likely to insist on the same for employees they obtain from Original Employer. Firing employees for refusing to sign does, of course, put them in the job market as potential competitors, but the company may well find it acceptable to do that on their own terms. In particular, Big Company can ensure that those who won't sign go out the door with minimal knowledge of Big Company's clients, trade secrets, etc. other than those obtained from Original Employer. And that leads into other forms of inducement. Big Company can do some or all of the following things, depending on the particular employment situation: offer bonus compensation for signing promote those who sign and / or demote / reassign those who don't change job duties for those who refuse to sign do all manner of nastier things to be unfriendly to employees who refuse to sign Some of those fit directly into Big Company's perceived interest in avoiding employees using Big Company internal information to jump ship and compete with them, and others could fit into Big Company policy about which jobs require an NC. Some are just pressure tactics, but that does not necessarily make them unlawful (nor are all variations on the others necessarily lawful).
There have been cases in the UK where paying someone's legal bills was interpreted as joining their case. So when A with no money libels someone, and B with deep pockets pays A's lawyer, then B risks being held liable for damages if A gets convicted. So B should be very careful. Just giving you money is probably the safest. But attorney-client privilege is between attorney and client. I have been laid off twice with my company asking me to take an employment lawyer and paying for it. (Interestingly each time the bill was exactly the maximum amount the company was willing to pay :-) It would have been absurd if my company could demand information that is under attorney-client privilege just because they paid the bill. Why did two companies pay the lawyers bill? Because that way they ensure that the separation is without problems. The lawyer explained the settlement contract and what it meant exactly. They also checked that the contract didn’t contain anything unacceptable which the company would have fixed. So if I had tried to sue them later I would have no chance to win (but there was no reason to sue). Another reason not to sue was that the company offered I settlement that was very significantly more than was legally required, but if you sued them you would only get what you got in court - most likely less than you would get without suing. So basically they paid to make sure I would have no reason to sue them later.
Yes such a username would be personal data. It is information that relates to an identifiable person. In this context,a person isn't identifiable only if you can infer their real-world identity, but already if you can single out one person's records. Thus, your random IDs and any linked information would be personal data as well. Just because something is personal data doesn't mean that processing it is illegal. It just means you need a legal basis. That could be necessity for performing a contract with the data subject (like saving game progress), a legitimate interest, or consent. Taking into account GDPR principles like &quot;data protection by design and by default&quot;, it could be sensible to hide a players stats from the leaderboard until they give consent. On the other hand, you may have a legitimate interest to provide leaderboard data for ranking/comparison, especially if the leaderboard entries are pseudonymized. In any case, it should be clear to the users which information is visible to others.
if a manager emailed an prospective employee a contract containing the pay rate of $20/hr, if the prospective employee crossed out $20/hr and replaced it with $25/hr, then went to work and gave the manager the contract which he failed to carefully read, continued working for a few months, would the employee be entitled to $20/hr? A party ought to timely alert or notify the other counterparty about any disagreements or proposed changes. This is especially recommendable when evidence suggests that the counterparty's expectation that the party only would sign the contract was reasonable. In the example you outline, the employee's unilateral alteration of the compensation/rate in the contract seems unlikely to favor the employee's position. That is because typically employer and employee negotiate compensation prior to formalizing their agreement. In that case, the employee would need stronger evidence with which to overcome the employer's credible argument that he did not knowingly accept the altered rate.
Your interpretation seems to be correct. A furloughed employee is defined by Acas to be one who is "temporarily sent home because there's no work". This could in principle be through unpaid leave. The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme is a government scheme to compensate employers for the wage bills of their staff during the furlough, so that the furloughed staff can continue to receive some income. An employee would have no direct dealings with the scheme and would continue to be paid via their employer. Your company seems to be offering to match the terms offered to employees under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme of 80% of salary, presumably out of their own funds. A kind gesture, it seems!
It may be discrimination, but it is not discrimination based upon any reason that the company is prohibited from engaging in. This conduct is legal in pretty much all U.S. jurisdictions.
Presumably Blue Team are all employees of some company ("the employer"), so the software is a work for hire and copyright is owned by the employer. However in the UK and some other countries (but not in the US) authors also have "moral rights" over their work, including attribution, integrity, and association of an author to the work. This article (by Canadian lawyer Mark H. Evans) discusses the question of moral rights in works for hire: For example, if a former employee wrote a blog to promote a company’s services that was published on the company’s website under that author’s name, the company might find itself being sued for breach of the author’s moral rights if it were to delete the author’s name and replace it with the name of an employee who wasn’t the author but is still with the company. On the face of it John would be in a similar position to the blog author in the quote. So for the employer (including Jane, as an employee) to remove John's name would be a violation of his moral rights to attribution. In this case the source code is public. However in most commercial settings it would be secret: The secrecy of the code would make it harder for John to find out his name had been removed. However lets suppose that a friend still in Blue Team were to tell him. I'm not sure about discovery rules in various countries, but presumably a serious lawsuit could get confirmation. The secrecy of the source code also means that fewer people would see John's name there than if it were generally published. This would lessen the damages, but not eliminate them. John would probably be able to get an injunction ordering that his name be restored. Many programs are published with a credit list, and John would certainly have a moral right to appear on such a list with the same prominence as other team members. From later in the same article: While moral rights are personal and can’t be assigned, they can be waived. This is an important solution to navigating moral rights in works generated by employees and contractors. And because any assignment of copyright is not an automatic waiver of moral rights, the waiver must be express. So it depends on the contract between John and the employer. If John has explicitly waived his right to attribution then the employer is in the clear.