By selling a flagged solution to a student to catch them cheating, would the seller be liable for the breach of contract? This is a follow up question to this HNQ question from academia. Suppose a student S posts an assignment for school/university/... on a freelancer website. A faculty member F sees this and agrees to provide a solution to the assignment for a price x. Legally, imho, the contract that S and F enter is valid. S provides the price x, F provides the solution. However, F decides to provide a solution that is uniquely identifiable, thereby knowingly sabotaging their solution. The student S turns in the solution, F identifies it and therefore F fails S and takes disciplinary action for cheating. F returns the money to S later and was always going to do so. However, F and S had a contract. I assume F is breaching the contract to provide a "valid" solution by providing a solution they know will not do what the student wants it to do, even if it looks like it would. Let's take US law for reference though I suppose it would be more or less the same in many jurisdictions. Is F liable for the breach of contract and what possible damages could they be liable for? Would it be a realistic scenario that the student sues F for getting them thrown out of the school if that happens and gets a compensation for that? Or in other words, apart from probably beeing ethical, is it legal to place a trap for the student?
The contract is almost certainly void as it is against public policy. Enabling a student to cheat in not in the public interest.
if a friend hires someone to fix something in their house, but after the repairs are done, the friend refuses to pay, this would likely fall under theft of service. This is incorrect. The most common distinction is intent. (The federal Canadian criminal code provision for theft (Section 332) requires intent to commit the crime, although &quot;false pretenses&quot; (Section 362) is probably a better match within the Canadian criminal code to theft of services and also requires a showing of intent). If breaching a promise to pay that the person making the promise to pay intended to be honor when the promise was made fails to pay (e.g. due to poor budgeting or losing a job) this is a breach of contract. Similarly, if someone accidentally attaches the wrong cable line to their TV and gets the premium package rather than the regular one, but didn't realize that fact, the cable company might have a claim for negligence or for unjust enrichment, but this would not constitute theft. In contrast, obtaining services knowing at the outset that you do not intend to honor your promise yet deceiving the service provider with your promise is theft. Theft (in the context of a theft of services) is intentionally obtaining services by deceit with an intent not to pay for them at the time that they are obtained. Proving this intent is usually prohibitively difficult and no something that law enforcement will choose to press charges regarding, but with very clear evidence (e.g. an audiotape of the person making a promise to pay bragging immediately before or after making the promise to pay about how he never intends to pay in the first place, or in a case with a pattern of conduct involving many service providers on multiple occasions), charges can be pressed and a conviction can be won. Also, to be clear, it has nothing to do, per se, with the power relationships of the parties. If an employer picks up a bunch of day laborers telling them that they will be paid an agreed rate at the end of the day for the work they are made to do, and the employer not only doesn't pay them at the end of the day but didn't intend to do so in the first place and perhaps has a practice of picking up day laborers and then refusing to pay them without good cause, that is theft of services a.k.a. wage theft. if I play a movie from a streaming service and screen-share on Zoom, I would be committing civil copyright infringement (if it is not fair use), but if I give other people my login credentials for the streaming service, it would be theft of service, I think, depending on the jurisdiction This isn't a good analogy as it implicates copyright law which is quite different from other bodies of law. Some acts are both civil and criminal copyright violations. But criminal copyright violations are generally not a theft of services. In Canada, the typical criminal copyright violation involves the sale or rental of the copyright protected material to third parties for money. how does this distinction affect the outcome for a person liable/guilty of either? Civil law violations are a basis to bring a lawsuit against someone who breaches the law in a civil manner for money damages sufficient to compensate the person bringing the lawsuit for the damages that they have suffered. Theft is a criminal offense. The prosecutor's office decides whether or not to bring charges and if it does bring charges does so (in Canada) in the name of the Crown, at the government's expense under criminal procedure rather than the civil procedure applicable to lawsuits. The victim is usually a witness and is usually consulted, but is not a party to a criminal case. If a conviction is obtained for a criminal offense, the penalty is usually some combination of incarceration, a fine, probation and community service, as authorized by statute, with court costs and restitution to the victim tacked on as an afterthought. The measure of what is owed as restitution is typically more grudging than the measure of the damages that can be awarded in a civil lawsuit. The two remedies are not mutually exclusive. Someone who is prosecuted for committing a crime can also be sued if the evidence supports both civil and criminal claims. Someone who is sued can also be prosecuted if the evidence supports both civil and criminal claims.
a gutter cleaner drops a leaflet with phone number, and as my gutters needed to be cleaned I called him, we met and I gave him a deposit for the work in cash. The gutter cleaner put everything in writing at the back of the leaflet and signed it. In other words, you have a written contract which you fulfilled but the other party did not fulfill, so they now either owe you a service or your money back. This is a civil law matter which you can bring to a county court. You have a telephone number, so it should be possible to identify the other party. lure him into a trap. But then- how do I turn him into the police and keep everything legal? Was thinking of using pepper spray, but I live in Newcastle, and it's illegal to use it in the UK. Any ideas? This is a very bad idea! Apprehending suspects is the job of the police, not yours. Well, there is the concept of a citizen's arrest, but this is only an option in a very limited number of cases, specifically when you catch a criminal in the act and need to prevent the suspect from getting away before the police arrives. And even then you are on very shaky legal ground if the suspect claims you used more force than necessary or if the court doubts that a citizen's arrest was necessary in this particular case. And in this case a court probably won't believe that a citizen's arrest is justified, because the gutter cleaner probably didn't even commit a crime. They just violated a contract. That's a civil matter, not a criminal matter. It might be a criminal matter if they never intended to fulfill the contract (fraud), but you don't know that. If you use violence on a person just because they owe you money, you are very likely committing a crime yourself.
You are probably an employee Answer these questions: Can you say “no” when the University offers you work? Or vice-versa, can they say “no” when you want to work? Can you subcontract the work? That is, can you hire someone to do what the University hired you to do? Do you control how and when you work? For example, when you break University rules are you subject to University discipline or is this treated as a breach of contract? Do you provide your own tools and equipment? Can you make a profit or loss (if you get paid by the hour the answer is “no”)? Do you take out your own public liability and/or professional indemnity insurance? If the answers to most of these questions are “no”, you’re an employee.
Of course you'd be in legal trouble, the contract is still valid. I also don't know why you don't consider virtual goods to be goods. Take this example: You buy a 1 year subscription for (example) netflix. The next day they cancel your subscription but don't give you the money back because its not a "real good". This should make it clear that virtual goods are goods too in the eyes of the law. Question is if police/lawyers care about it as much as for "real" goods.
No, a penalty clause is illegal, end of story. A contract could include a &quot;liquidated damages&quot; clause – this is how late fees are legal – that if you breach the contract in a certain way, you will compensate the company for the damage that you have done (bookkeeping, interest on money owed) in a standard and reasonable manner. Incidentally, what you describe is slavery, which is illegal throughout the US. The closest you could get is if the company offers a benefit for staying with the company for some period of time, then the employee might forego that benefit if they don't fulfill that aspect of the contract.
No Let's consider a similar scenario. If you made a beverage which poisoned a number of people, would you be absolved of liability because you gave it away for free? Of course not. As there is no contract between you, they would have to bring an action against you in the tort of negligence or negligent misstatement OR under consumer protection law. To succeed at tort they would need to prove that you owed them a duty of care; from Donoghue v Stevenson "You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonable foresee would be likely to injure ... persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably have them in contemplation ...". Most cases will founder on your inability to foresee the use to which your software may be put. Consumer law is jurisdiction specific but they generally contain warranties that what you provide (gratis or otherwise) is fit for purpose, merchantable and that you do not make false and misleading statements. There is a chance that a case brought under this sort of law could succeed as you have not limited the purpose, specifically declared that it is not of merchantable quality and have (presumable) said what it does so that, if it doesn't do what you said, you have been misleading and deceptive.
Contracts are routinely held to be valid even when there is negligible or literally zero financial “gain” (compensation, which they take into consideration in order to enter into the contract). A document purporting to be a contract might be held invalid if it is a bare promise like “I promise to give you $100 on Friday”, but you can make it an enforceable contract by including “if you give me a french fry today”. Reasoning that party “could have” done something else does not invalidate a contract, for example the party might have had $3 at the time and could have purchased a whole bag of fries. The only imaginable relevance of “I could have” thinking would be if the terms of the contract are so unclear that the party would not reasonably have understood the contract to have obligated them to pay $100, or that they would have reasonably believed that they were to receive a suitcase full of french fries. There is a (huge) difference between subjective errors in interpreting a contract and objective uncertainty. Objective uncertainty is fundamentally about the linguistic structure of the agreement, i.e. words like “it” which have no intrinsic referent, or “required books and clothing” (which could mean “required books and all clothing”, or “required books and required clothing”). There may be special rules of legal interpretation addressing how such ambiguities are resolved (this one is not well established, but is known in some spheres as the “across-the-board rule”). Personal interpretation does not enter into decisions as to the validity of a contract: if you misinterpret the words of a contract, regardless of how strong your proof is that at the time you did not understand the contract, that doesn’t matter, unless you can show that at the time you were actually not competent (did not know Armenian and could not have understood what the contract required). The courts look at the words of the contract, assume that the parties have availed themselves of wise legal counsel, and understand how the courts would interpret the contract, then they filter the words of the contract through a sieve composed of rules constituting &quot;the law&quot;, and declare what parties A and B must do.