How prominent must terms of service be? How easy must it be to find a website's terms of service? I assume that if it's very difficult to find, then users couldn't be reasonably expected to know the terms of service. Are there any guidelines for where the link to the terms of service must be, what font size it must use, et cetera?
Generally, terms of service must be prominently displayed. Click-wrapped terms have been found enforceable if the user is required to view them prior to engaging in activities on the website. However, browser-wrapped terms have been found unenforceable if a reasonable user would not be expected to view the terms prior to engaging in a transaction. As an example, when you register an account on the Stack Exchange network, your viewing of legal links, and continuning to use the site after this, is recorded. This could be used as evidence that you agreed to the terms. There are views that the link to the terms should be placed in the upper-left quadrant of the homepage - this will mean the defendant would need to prove that they ignored the link. As for font size, while there are no general requirements per se, it is necessary that they be legible (that is, not excessively small).
Only if you ask Valve for permission first, and they agree in writing. I'm not a lawyer, but when I was reading through the Subscriber license you linked, this stuck out to me: You are entitled to use the Content and Services for your own personal use, but you are not entitled to: (i) sell, grant a security interest in or transfer reproductions of the Content and Services to other parties in any way, nor to rent, lease or license the Content and Services to others without the prior written consent of Valve, except to the extent expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use); (ii) host or provide matchmaking services for the Content and Services or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose including, but not limited to network play over the Internet, network play utilizing commercial or non-commercial gaming networks or as part of content aggregation networks, websites or services, without the prior written consent of Valve; or (iii) exploit the Content and Services or any of its parts for any commercial purpose, except as expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). The part that I've bolded is probably the part that makes this against the Terms of Service, since in order to post these sorts of automated messages to their service, you'd need to use a &quot;utility program&quot; to &quot;emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services&quot;. I doubt that Valve would ever agree, since such a program could very easily be used to create spam bots that works bombard users with unsolicited advertisements, but maybe Valve would be willing to cut deals with AAA video game companies to let them deploy tools to automatically manage their store pages.
The fact that the terms and conditions do not mention the word &quot;disable&quot; is significant, but not in the way you seem to think. You state: &quot;...the merchant's T&amp;C which does not explicitly allow the merchant to charge a fee for a disabled account&quot;. However, this doesn't mean that the merchant needs to explicitly state that they may. What it actually means is that the merchant does not recognize the term &quot;disable&quot; in the context of terminating the service contract. (Did they use stop, terminate, delete, eliminate, fall into disuse, log off, etc. or any other similar expressions?) You haven't defined what &quot;disable&quot; means, but perhaps it is more like a &quot;pause&quot; in service for which payment is still required? (Like having the post office hold your mail vs terminating all deliveries.) What you need to do is to read the section of the T&amp;Cs that deals with terminating service and payment, understand what is required, and execute the procedures they describe. Whatever words they use, do that. If you have done all the steps and can prove it then you have a case against them, otherwise you are arguing semantics and interpretation... As to the title question, it does not appear that any &quot;law&quot; has been broken, this is just a contractual misunderstanding. P.S. This is the reason why I always set up payments through my bank to &quot;push&quot; money to vendors rather than authorizing them to &quot;pull&quot; money from me. When I am done I notify them and stop paying. I don't need to ask them to please stop taking it from me.
For your example of items with Marvel characters on them for sale by people and companies not licensed by Marvel, Redbubble clearly states that We ask, rather we beg, that you remember this when you are posting work on Redbubble. If you make sure that all the works you upload consist of your very own, original ideas and are not infringing on the intellectual property or publicity rights of another... (from https://help.redbubble.com/hc/en-us/articles/201579195 ) and further, Redbubble has full contact information for the submission of Notice and Takedown Reports by each real trademark owner. There are many individuals who upload products which use unlicensed artwork in violation of trademarks, and Redbubble acknowledges this and gives recourse to the license holder to inform them so they can remove the items. It's not a perfect system, but Redbubble it seems makes every effort to help police their market. ( Teepublic has a very clear policy statement, too: https://www.teepublic.com/copyright-policy ) Many companies - such as Marvel - employ agents to regularly check such websites and issue takedown demands to the sites; the sites in turn remove the products, and in some instances, ban the individual from using the site again. In the case of Amazon, there can be two types of products sold that use trademarked artwork and characters: items sold by legitimate businesses that have license agreements with the trademark owners and who have the products sold by Amazon itself; and items sold on the Amazon marketplace by individuals who open Amazon Marketplace accounts themselves and don't have licenses. Amazon will be sure to check the products they sell; they will have a takedown notices system for their marketplace vendors. eBay is somewhat the same way; there is a mix of individuals and businesses on eBay, but eBay doesn't operate an umbrella sell/ship by eBay, like Amazon. It's kind of a whack-a-mole situation on the Interwebs. How much time/money does a company spend to chase down trademark infringement? Is it worth going to court for persistent violators? (These are, for the most part, civil cases, not criminal). Violators can always open a new account on sites such as Redbubble and eBay under a different name. And it starts all over again.
There may be violations of consumer protection and/or advertising statutes here by the online store, but the common law position is that: The website's owner is making an invitation to treat Based on that, you are making an offer The contract comes into place when the website's owner accepts your offer. The time of contract formation is "when the parties give objective manifestation of an intent to form the contract." You would need to read the site very carefully, in particular their terms and conditions, acknowledgement page and/or email to see if they are actually accepting your offer or if there are conditions attached. If there is no clear, unconditional acceptance then there is no contract at that time; this applies even if you have paid for the goods. If this is the case (and I strongly suspect that it would be for most online stores), then their acceptance of your offer and the formation of the contract probably does not come into effect until they "give objective manifestation of an intent to form the contract" by shipping the goods. Up until that time there is no contract and their only obligation to you is to promptly refund your money.
The part about "If I'm the owner of the content, surely I have the right to request its deletion" is the problem. Sure, you have the right to request, but you can't legally compel. You have an agreement with them, according to which you got something, and they got something. You can't then take back the thing that you gave them, which is permission to use. You didn't give them the IP itself, which you still hold. Here's an analogy. You may own a car, and can give a person permission to use the car (let's say "if you bring me back a pound of cheese from the store"). You cannot later change your mind (especially after you've gotten the cheese) a say that you retract that permission and therefore they actually stole your car. When permission to use is given, as long as the conditions for granting permission are satisfied, you can't un-give permission.
"...the listing ad of property is not a property of website." Why do you think that? Just because a website exists does not mean you can legally scrape it. Read the Terms of Service of the site; there is a good chance the TOS forbids scraping or copying of any part of the website in any manner, including scraping. If the property listings are from a third party service that provides real estate listings to websites, then those property listings are licensed to that website, and by scraping them you will likely be violating the TOSs of those two services. By illegally scraping the content of a website, you are opening yourself up to being involved in copyright infringement and/or being liable to be the subject of a civil lawsuit.
What would be the legal validity of this behaviour? Your changes to the browser source of the website contract or license of Terms of Service (TOS) - essentially a "click-wrap" license - before agreeing to it means nothing in a legal sense, other than to void the contract. The other party (the website) can't possibly agree to those contract changes without them being submitted as contractual changes and agreeing to them, if they did agree to them. That's basic contract law. That website TOS probably has a clause that says that if you don't agree to the TOS in full, as written, without modifications, you can't use the website. And the TOS may also say that they reserve the right to prevent you from using the site by closing your account or even blocking your access. Your "witness" to the contract changes is meaningless, as your witness is not a party to the contract. And any witness to the fact that you have changed the terms of the TOS before agreeing to it would work against you in a civil proceeding as proof of your attempt at modifying the contract.