Can legal/ pre-action correspondence with a business be subject to a SAR? Bob has been harmed by a business ACME inc. He sends them a letter before claiming damages as under the pre action protocol. They send him a reply. Bob loses his copy of both of these articles of correspondence, but would like to refer back to them. Can he request them from ACME Inc. Under the DPA 2018?
Maybe not. The ICO says that The right of access enables individuals to obtain their personal data rather than giving them a right to see copies of documents containing their personal data. It might be valid to interpret the DPA / UKGDPR in a way that the relevant personal data undergoing processing in their system is the existence of the letters, but that you are not entitled to a copy of the letters. This is in line with the purpose of the right to access, that you can check what data they are processing about you and whether it is correct. If that argument holds and the data subject insists on receiving a copy of the letters, it might be legitimate to charge them a fee for these copies. But in practice: The data controller might not make this argument and just hand over the copies. It is worth a try. A right to access founded in data protection might not be the only way to receive a copy of these materials. If the letters are relevant for legal proceedings, they could perhaps be requested during the disclosure process.
In most jurisdictions a message sent by email is now legally the same as one sent on paper by, say, postal mail, and a name typed at the end, or other indication of source is the legal equivalent of a physical signature. You are probably in the same legal position yu would have been in if you had written, signed, and sent by post a letter of acceptance.
Is there a law requiring a landlord to respond to rental agencies request for information in regards to previous tenants? No. There is no such law.
Focusing on the legal question, the obstruction of correspondence statute would not be applicable to UPS package deliveries. To repeat 18 USC 1702, Whoever takes any letter, postal card, or package out of any post office or any authorized depository for mail matter, or from any letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any post office or authorized depository, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was directed, with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or opens, secretes, embezzles, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. Private package delivery services deliver to the porch (pr similar), not to an authorized depository (such as a mailbox). They are not "mail", and they have not been in the custody of the postal service (unless they have, where USPS actually makes the delivery). Such deliveries constitute unsolicited goods / unordered merchandise, since they were not things that you requested. There are state and federal rules to the effect that you may accept such goods as gifts, and you have no obligation to return the goods. Here is the Washington state law for example, and here is what the FTC says about it at the federal level. The intended recipient cannot impose an obligation on you to store and guard his possessions, nor can a delivery service impose an obligation to safeguard property that they are responsible for.
The line they'll rely on for GDPR compliance is the first part of that sentence - "If you agree to this during the order process", which suggests that there will be a separate request to opt in to marketing communications at some other time in the process. Check any order documents. There's likely to be a tick box or similar on at least one. If that implies opting out rather than opting in there may be grounds to argue with that under GDPR, but there's nothing in the quoted text that suggests a problem.
Art. 15(4) GDPR says: (4) The right to obtain a copy referred to in paragraph 3 shall not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others. If I was the controller in this situation, and I believed that this would endanger the students that have criticised the professor, I would base my argument for not complying on this. In addition, Art. 85 GDPR requires member states to: [...] reconcile the right to the protection of personal data pursuant to this Regulation with the right to freedom of expression and information [...] So you may be able to argue that the students posting messages are engaging in "processing for journalistic purposes and the purposes of academic, artistic or literary expression", depending on the laws of the particular member state. (edit: this could be difficult since you mention it is a private database). The second case seems just like the first in terms of GDPR, but may constitute defamation. Defamation (or libel) laws differ wildly in each country; he Wikipedia article on Defamation explains the situation in each member state in more detail. In the third case: if the professor submits a request based on the rights of a data subject other than himself, they don't need to comply. These requests need to come from the data subjects themselves, not just a random person assuming authority. (although I suppose it's possible for them to give power of attorney to the department head if they wanted to) Personal data and the rights that GDPR provides to data subjects always relate to a natural person, not an institution or a company.
You don't say what jurisdiction's patent laws you're interested in, and priority dates can differ in different schemes. I'm answering as to U.S. law only. In the United States, under the current hybrid "first-inventor-to-file" system, the priority date--the date that determines who "wins" if there are multiple claims to a specific invention--is, with some exceptions that I won't go into, the date of your first application. In other words, the date that the PTO got it in the mail. Once your application is submitted, it is--again, with some limitations I won't get into--prior art for the purposes of any later-submitted application. They can't get another application later, grant it first, and then deny your application based on the later-submitted application. Your application date would still win out. Could someone in the USPTO slip your application out of the stack, fudge the dates, and convince some other company to submit a similar application to get priority over you? Not as a practical matter, no. The USPTO isn't one guy in a room; it's a large organization, and the person who opens the mail, types in your application details, and sends you a receipt, isn't the same guy who knows whether your invention is any good or not. And, frankly, very few patentable inventions are going to be worth someone risking their job and/or jail time over--especially when there would be significant evidence of the misconduct--for example, your patent agent's files. So what are the chances that the examiner on your patent: 1) Is a nefarious character who has lived a life of public service long enough and wants to go rogue; 2) Has a friend in the mailroom who is also an expert in the field of your invention; and 3) Has a conduct in industry who is willing to break the law for the rights to your invention? Slim to none. And if you have an invention that is really so revolutionary that it's going to be worth so many people risking so much to steal it, odds are there will be other evidence that you were the inventor.
No landlord-tenant laws that I have ever seen impose an obligation on a landlord to give a point by point response to everything in an email from a tenant. However, a tenant probably has the right or obligation to provide a landlord with written notification of a problem requiring remedy. You might then be required by law to provide a specific reply within some time frame, for example "We will fix that tomorrow afternoon", or "We are not required to fix that": it would depend on the jurisdiction and the accusation. Some caution in how you respond is warranted, because your answers can be used against you in a court of law, thus you want to be sure that your response is not misleading, and that you don't accidentally promise to do something that you won't actually do. There is a concept of "adoptive admission", where silence can be used against you. A typical case is if Smith says to Jones "That was really cold-blooded, the way you murdered Thompson", and Jones does not respond to the accusation – that fact can be introduced as evidence, because there is an assumption that if Jones were really innocent, they would protest the accusation. I don't see any way for "failure to respond to everything" in this manner could constitute an adoptive admission – an "admission" means that you directly or indirectly indicate that you did a thing, which is not the same as ipso facto agreeing to something (for example, not replying to a statement "I'd like my rent reduced by $100 per month" is not an "adoptive agreement").