Is it legal in the UK to give different prices to different users, for price optimisation, using A/B testing I'm the CTO for a startup that is about to launch. We have a monthly subscription plan, and we are not sure what price to set it at. We have done some rough analysis, but we are considering using A/B testing to optimise the price further. I want to know if there are any laws against this, considering we are a UK incorporated company, and we will be marketing to people worldwide. I don't want to know reasons for or against A/B testing prices unless they have a legal basis, such as angering users and so on, only any potential legal ramifications. So far I haven't found any online.
You need professional legal advice You need to comply with the law in every jurisdiction in which you do business. Your place of incorporation is irrelevant. If you are selling to Uzbekistan you need to comply with Uzbeki law, Queensland, Queensland and Australian law, Maine, Maine and US law etc. In most jurisdictions, discrimination is legal unless it is on the basis of a protected class, usually things like sex, race, etc. In the EU, price discrimination is illegal if it is an abuse of market power. Therefore, among other things you have to have market power. https://www.coleurope.eu/system/files_force/research-paper/gclc_wp_07-05.pdf
Your VPN scenario is why you have to show the banner to everyone. If you somehow knew beyond any doubt that someone was not in the EU, then you would not have to show a banner, but because you can't verify that, you should always show the banner. Doing so also protects against accidentally violating a similar law in another country; the GDPR is the best-known privacy law, but it is far from the only one. It's good practice to ask for people's permission before collecting their information anyway.
The BBC iPlayer restrictions are not, as far as I'm aware, based on regulations; they are based on licensing agreements (in fact, the page you link to says this explicitly). Whether the same is true of programs from other services in other countries--or even other services in the UK--is going to depend on the contracts between those services and you and the contracts between those services and their content providers.
Discriminatory pricing is a real thing. See this BuzzFeed video on discriminatory pricing as an example on how men's and women's products cost differently, even if the men's product consumes more raw material yet still costs less. However, it's illegal for hotels to charge different rates for their rooms, or for restaurants to charge unfairly or give preferential treatment; they are "public accommodations" protected under the various Civil Rights Acts. However, colleges are exempt from current laws, and it's not just tech colleges; even traditional colleges require different SAT scores for entry based on race and/or gender, and also charge different tuition. They are private accommodations and are therefore generally allowed to do this. For example, you'll have a much harder time getting in to Harvard if you're of a particular race, even if you can afford the tuition, simply because you'll be expected to have a higher SAT score. There was a class action lawsuit in California over this (the students were above 4.0 GPA, yet denied entry based on race), and as a result of law changes afterwards, California institutions can no longer do this. This is not the situation in the rest of the country, as no Federal law yet exists that protects minorities, gender, sexual orientation, etc, in regards to higher education. Also, sometimes merely proving a gap exists might not be noticeable, as companies are also starting to display pages on their websites based on data-mined information about visitors, possibly including information that would otherwise be discriminatory if it were done in person, and hiding the information from the general public. Discrimination is a difficult beast to tame, and until the law is introduced that all products and services must be offered to all consumers at the same price regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc, businesses will continue to find ways to discriminate in legal ways.
Under the law of common law contracts, posting a price is an invitation to treat and is not binding. However, in many jurisdictions, there may be (probably is) statutory consumer protection law that make this practice illegal. Whether this means the business must honor the price or merely makes them liable to prosecution and fines depends on the specific law. For example, in Australia the law refers to this as multiple pricing. The law requires that the business withdraw the product from sale until the multiple pricing is fixed (i.e. they take the poster down) or, if they are unable or unwilling to do this, they must sell for the lower price. If they do neither then they have committed an offence and are liable to be fined by the government; the consumer does not get any compensation.
It's not illegal to ask. Whether they can give it to you, and under what circumstances, is another, much more complicated matter. For instance, if the database contains health information covered by HIPAA in the United States, or personal information covered by laws like GDPR or CCPA, the customer's ability to share the database may be restricted, either requiring additional confidentiality obligations/use restrictions, or preventing sharing entirely.
The creator of the software doesn't provide any warranty. If you feel confident in the quality of the software, nothing stops you from providing a warranty. If the software doesn't meet your guarantees, you will have to pay out because you provided the warranty, depending on the terms. Not the creator of the software because they explicitly didn't provide any warranty. If that's what you want to do, go ahead. I wouldn't. You don't have to republish under the BSD license, which you wouldn't. You must attach the license terms, which clarifies the role of the original creators, and that they don't give a warranty. Doing this allows you to copy the software. It doesn't mean you can't provide a warranty.
The customer will own exactly what is stated in the contract. As the contractor, who wants to be able to reuse code (which is in everybody’s best interest) you want to keep the copyright, with the client having the license to use the code any way they want. If the customer wants the copyright with the contractor losing all rights, that will be in the contract, and it will cost. If the contractor produced an application that use lots of domain knowledge supplied by the client, that will often not give the client copyright, if the contractor is the one producing the actual expression of that knowledge by translating knowledge into code. If the client provides knowledge that is actually a trade secret, then an NDA should be signed. And again, it’s contracts. The client can put into the contract that their domain knowledge must not be reused. That is quite reasonable. The client might add to the contract that the contractor will not write software for any competitor. That is legal if it is in the contract, but it will cost.