Is lying to your customers prosecutable? Topical example (concerning the Facebook bias controversy of May 2016): if Facebook knowingly discriminated against conservative stories in its Trending feature, but told users and the press that there was no bias, could Facebook be prosecuted under U.S. law?
No. In the United States, lying is not a crime. Unless it is done: under oath (in which case it's called perjury) or to a law enforcement agent conducting an investigation (in which case it's called obstruction). There are also the civil torts of slander (oral) and libel (written) if someone lies and damages the reputation or business interests of a person or company. Collectively, and without distinction, these are called defamation. Lying also has a close cousin &mdash; the civil tort of fraud &mdash; which usually applies to inducement into a transaction or a contract. There are also consumer protection statutes (federal and state) that deal with truth in advertising, truth in lending, lemon laws, etc. But those are primarily civil statutes and the last two are pretty far afield from your question. But none of that applies to the Facebook case you described. So, no.
There is, in most countries at least, no law requiring a business to treat a customer fairly. In general, a business may refuse to serve a would-be customer for any reason or none, provided that the reason is not membership in a protected class (racial, religious, ethnic, or sexual bias, mostly). Exactly which classes are protected depends on the local law (in the US, there can be such laws at all of federal, state, and municipal levels). If a customer is asked to leave and does not do so, s/he could be charged with defiant trespass (or local equivalent). More likely, security, or the police, could simply escort the customer out of the business, using as much force as is reasonably needed for that purpose. Unless there are grounds for action not mentioned, I see no basis for a successful suit by the customer.
does a reference for a candidate employee have liability for what they say about the candidate? To my understanding lying isn't illegal. Lying is unlawful to the extent that the liar's deliberate intent to mislead other(s) causes or is likely to cause unwarranted harm. This is regardless of whether &quot;the person acting as a reference isn't under obligation not to be a reference&quot;. Lies can directly harm the candidate and/or the company, and others indirectly. The harm to the candidate is known as, or comes in the form of, defamation. Depending on the jurisdiction, an intent to mislead might not even be a prerrequisite for liability. For instance, Michigan statute MCL 600.2911(7) allows suits for libel or slander if &quot;the defamatory falsehood concerns the private individual and was published negligently&quot; (emphasis added). The liar's intent to mislead and his knowledge of the falsehood of his statements can only worsen the harm inflicted and his liability therefor. Likewise, the liar can be liable to the company for inducing it to hire a candidate the company would not have hired had it known the truth. Liability ensues when the hired candidate makes the company incur losses which would be prevented by relying on a truthful reference. If the reference is truthful, the chances for liability are significantly narrower. These scenarios typically involve matters of privacy or disclosures that are protected/sanctioned by law.
Each case is decided on its own facts I know you want a clear answer to where the bright line between illegality and legality but there simply isn’t one. The reason you feel there is a “legal grey area” is because there’s a legal gray area. The way the common law works is that there are some acts and omissions that are clearly crimes/torts/breach of contract, some that aren’t and some that live in that grey area. When someone brings a case in the grey, the court will make a ruling that will apply to similar facts and we get a little light on the subject. Then the legislature changes the law and it all goes dark again. Each of your bullet points is simply too vague and encompasses so many fact patterns that it’s impossible to say. For example, “Using a fake name/birthday”: do the ToS prohibit this? is there an intent to mislead or deceive? are there laws that prohibit this? is a benefit being received dishonesty? etc. If you come with a specific, detailed fact pattern there might be case law that is specifically relevant that will allow an answer with a high chance of being right. However, nuances matter and no two fact patterns are exactly the same and the difference might be enough to distinguish your case from the precedent. Or there might not be a relevant precedent because no one has sued/prosecuted on this fact pattern before. Then we are in virgin territory and even experts are only making educated guesses until the judge (and the appeals court(s)) hand down their decision. These are the most interesting cases to watch but the most terrifying to be part of. If you need to ask the question”where’s the legal line on this?”, there’s a decent chance you have a foot on each side.
If I understand your question, you're asking the difference between something like this: "You shouldn't do business with Bob; he's a child molester. Raped a whole bunch of kids. Everyone knows about it." and this: "You're thinking of doing business with Bob? Huh. That's your call, of course. I won't say anything against Bob. But Bill is in the same business, and I happen to know that Bill has never molested any kids." or this: "There are three people you could do business with. There's me. I've never molested any kids. There's Bill; he's a little expensive, but he's never molested any kids either. Then there's Bob. I don't have anything to say about Bob." I don't know the answer under German law, but under U.S. law, it's surprisingly complicated, and varies by jurisdiction. Here is a thorough but somewhat dated article on the subject. New York has recently established an explicit test for defamation by implication: To survive a motion to dismiss a claim for defamation by implication where the factual statements at issue are substantially true, the plaintiff must make a rigorous showing that the language of the communication as a whole can be reasonably read both to impart a defamatory inference and to affirmatively suggest that the author intended or endorsed that inference. Stepanov v Dow Jones &amp; Co., 2014 NY Slip Op 03940 (App. Div. May 29, 2014). That opinion also discusses the other approaches used in other U.S. states. Under that standard, it seems clear that my example statements would be defamatory; any juror would immediately understand both the factual implication and that it was 100% intentional. In practical terms, I doubt any court in the United States would not consider them defamatory. In general, defamation is harder to prove in the United States than in other jurisdictions, because of the strong protections afforded to speech under the First Amendment--but I don't know enough about German law to speak to that issue.
Short version: No, no one has even been prosecuted. Does the perjury clause apply to all the information in the notification, or only the statement that the complaining party is authorised to act etc. ? This seems to be answerable by the plain text of the statute that you quoted: A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. There doesn't seem to be any remotely grammatical way to read &quot;under penalty of perjury&quot; as modifying anything in the first part of the sentence (i.e, the statement or the information in the notification). The closest we could come would be reading &quot;A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury&quot; as saying that the information is both accurate and under penalty of perjury. Even if we ignore the fact that that would add a stray comma (as comma errors are not uncommon), that still leaves us with &quot;that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed&quot; after an additional comma. This would need a conjunction (such as &quot;and&quot;) that is not there in order for it to read at all correctly. On the other hand, it is perfectly grammatical to read it as: A statement: that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. This would mean that only the statement that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder is made under penalty of perjury. Thus, the &quot;statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized&quot; described in § 512(c)(3)(a)(v) and referenced in your second question is not made under penalty of perjury. I couldn't find any case law regarding this, though, which brings us to the second question: Has anyone ever actually been convicted of perjury as a result of sending a DMCA notice that lied about the &quot;good faith belief&quot; in the infringing nature of the target material? As far as I can tell, no one has ever even been criminally prosecuted for sending false DMCA notices, let alone convicted. In fact, as far as I can tell, no one has ever been prosecuted for false copyright claims under any other laws, either. It's a bit difficult to find an authoritative reference stating something has never happened, and the best I found was the Wikipedia article on Copyfraud, which cites Fishman, Stephen. The Public Domain, Nolo (2006), pp. 24–29 for the proposition that (presumably as of 2006), &quot;[n]o company has ever been prosecuted for violating&quot; a related law on false claims of copyright. Obviously, that's not a great source, due to the date, not having access to the original text, and the fact that it's not quite the same law. I also tried quite a number of search terms on Google and found no criminal prosecutions there, either. There have, however, been civil suits regarding such bad-faith misrepresentations: Automattic, owners of Wordpress.com, have filed at least two. In at least one of those, a lack of such a good-faith claim by the defendant was in fact found by the court: Similarly, here, the Court finds that Defendant knowingly misrepresented that Hotham violated his copyright because Defendant could not have reasonably believed that the Press Release he sent to Hotham was protected under copyright. Moreover, there can be no dispute that Defendant knew, and indeed, specifically intended, that the takedown notice would result in the disabling of Hotham's article. This resulted in the court finding the defendant liable for damages under § 512(f) for the time and money that the plaintiffs spent dealing with the results of the fraudulent DMCA takedown notice. Neither the court nor the plaintiffs mention perjury at any point other than quoting the takedown notice (unsurprising, though, given that it's a civil suit).
Typical in any of the several united-states No, this fails to meet two of the core elements of libel. The statement must be Adverse (fails) Stated by one party To a second party About a third party (fails) The case you're thinking of, where a company brags excessively about their company or products, are covered by a variety of securities and trade laws, such as false advertising. Many of these are applicable in the Federal domain, i.e. are Federal rather than state laws. Edit: Now I see you've changed the question a bit to claiming to be first. Yes, the injured party can sue for that, but they are more claiming false advertising than libel. Accusing someone of not being first-to-market is not a particularly powerful or damning claim. Oreo didn't invent the sandwich cookie nor did Apple invent the computer. So such a claim is really a lot more about the publicity than actual, provable damages; so the controversy is more likely to be aired outside the court system, or in the courts but mainly for the publicity. (an example of the latter being the &quot;Taco Tuesday&quot; trademark-busting action; IIRC Taco Bell even paid the other party's legal fees, despite prevailing.)
The law is really bad at protecting whistleblowers From my understanding of US law, this is not unauthorised access to a computer: the reporter made a legitimate request to a remote computer, that computer provided data,the reporter accessed the supplied data on their own computer. However, pointing out the failures of people in power is fraught even if it is not illegal. It is certainly within the Governor’s power to authorise an investigation of the reporter. On the face of the law, it seems reasonable to suspect that what was done might be a violation so there is nothing legally wrong with initiating an investigation. I suspect that such a broad interpretation of the law would fall foul of the First Amendment which may partly explain why it wasn’t prosecuted: the government doesn’t want to find out. Similarly they can issue press releases, which, due to the First Amendment, don’t have to be true, just not defamatory. Saying it’s a possible violation is true and not defamatory. Saying the reporter was an evil person who is only doing this for political purposes is a statement of opinion and not defamatory. It’s a fact of the world that people with power can use that power in ways that are malicious, unethical, and unfair but not necessarily illegal.