What do statements that “X does not affect your statutory rights” accomplish? Often return policies will say something like none of these terms should be taken to curtail your statutory rights as a consumer”. What would be different if companies didn’t write these lines?
In one sense, nothing. Absence of such language would not cancel any statutory rights. One purpose of such language is that the consumer cannot later claim that the company tried to hide those statutory rights. In some consumer protection statutes, attempting to decisive a consumer into thinking that s/he does not have the rights granted by statute may itself be unlawful and a ground for damages. Also a court may be less likely to void the contract as contrary to the statue, when the contract says that it should be read as subject to the statute and the consumer's rights under it. Also, once such language becomes common, drafters of corporate contract language often imitate it without thinking what actual purpose it serves.
You’ve presented a number of different scenarios, without a lot of specifics, so I’ll start from the top, and from a US perspective. A very generic term that would come up in this situation is material misstatement. one might say that an account or line item is overstated or understated, or a misstatement could arise from the omission of a necessary note, because notes are an integral part of the financial statements. Financial statements are said to be materially misstated if the misstatement would affect the choice of a typical decisionmaker. There’s no explicit standard for what is or isn’t material, but in practice, auditors often choose some small fraction of net income as the threshold. Materiality can also be caused by positive vs. negative earnings, or other thresholds, like financing agreements which might oblige the company to keep its current ratio above a certain level, for example. In the US, the rules to which the statements have to be materially correct are known as GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and they are codified in the Financial Accounting Standards Board's Accounting Standards Codification (FASB ASC). Depending on how the scheme is arranged, issues in the realm of “buying stuff as a “customer” to make the business look good” include: Substance over form: it may not be appropriate to recognize as a sale at all. If the net effect is a transfer of cash from the owner or manager to the business, while the goods find their way back into the company warehouse, that could be considered as paid-in-capital, or even a liability, rather than a sale. Owner bought some product to inject cash, and put the goods back in the inventory? That’s cash from the stockholder, not a customer sale. Somebody in management moved a truckload of product to his storage unit, only to return it after year end? That might be more accurately characterized as a loan, not a sale. I don’t know of any specific terms for this exclusively, but there have certainly been cases where companies moved inventory to undisclosed warehouses in an effort to hide fictitious sales from their independent auditors. Edit: Another term for certain sales without commercial substance is a “roundtrip transaction” or “roundtripping.” Disclosure notes: even if there is commercial substance to the transaction, it may require disclosure notes, such as those for related party transactions, as required by ASC 850. Transactions with related parties must be disclosed even if they are not given accounting recognition (ASC 850-05-5). Examples of related parties are given in ASC 850-05-3, including “an entity and its principal owners, management, or members of their immediate families,” among others. Under the relevant definition, a person does not need a formal title to be considered a member of management (ASC 850-10-20). The related party disclosure is not required in consolidated financial statements, for transactions that are eliminated in the consolidation process (ASC 850-10-50-1). For sales from a public company to a bona-fide external customer, there’s also the major customers disclosure, but the threshold for that is 10% of revenue, which is much more than enough to materially impact the bottom line. Generally, transactions between a parent company and a subsidiary will be eliminated in the preparation of the parent’s (consolidated) financial statements (ASC 810). This means if the parent company A sells goods with a carrying value of $30 to its subsidiary, B, at a price of $50, A doesn’t recognize that $20 gross profit until B sells the goods to an outside party. Internally, B might carry the goods at $50 on B’s books, but A would have to cancel it out so that only $30 of that appears on A’s consolidated balance sheet. The consolidation method is applied when one business has a controlling interest in another, and in summary it means that the parent company reports A+B’s financials as if it was all a single entity. That means B’s assets and liabilities, revenues and expenses, are all reported as part of A. It also means any transactions between B and A are transactions within the entity; you wouldn’t recognize a gain or loss (nor revenue and GP) if your marketing department sold office equipment to your engineering department, and you don’t get to with subsidiaries either. Consolidation requires not only eliminating revenues, cost of goods sold, and excess carrying value of inventories on intra-entity transactions; it's also gains and losses on things like equipment, meaning the same transaction could require a consolidation adjustment twenty years later to eliminate excess depreciation expense. Long story short, ASC 810 deals with consolidation, and those rules apply when you create or purchase a subsidiary to buy your stuff, or use a subsidiary to pass the same $200,000 back and forth. When the parent entity does not have a controlling interest in the investee (the basic threshold is 50% of voting shares, or by some other agreement) but does have significant influence (representation on the board or other factors in ASC 323-10-15-6), then it will be treated as an equity method investment. Instead of adding the line items together, it's a single asset and A's portion of B's earnings are a single line item on the income statement, but the adjustments are similar to those in a consolidation. Another kind of revenue recognition game which companies used to play involved bill-and-hold arrangements, wherein the customer (or the “customer,” or a salesperson without any real input from the supposed customer) would place an order, and the company would send (or at least, prepare and book) an invoice (revenue), but not ship the goods until the customer actually asked for them. These days, the rules on revenue recognition are fairly guarded against these kinds of things, but some other examples of “sales” that aren’t really sales include consignment arrangements, repurchase agreements (could be a sale with right of return, or depending on terms could be effectively a lease or a financing arrangement), and the gross vs net revenue issue for principle/agent situations (airline and hotel booking sites are a popular example. If they’re an agent they’re required to report their commission on a net basis but would likely prefer to look bigger by calling it a $110 sale and $100 cost of goods sold, instead of just $10 revenue). If you’re interested in management schemes to mislead the users of financial statements, check out the SEC’s online archive of Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) here. Some of them just deal with individual professionals who should know better, but they can be pretty interesting, whether they involve poor ICFR, or intentional deception on the part of upper management (it's on management either way).
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.
Some kinds of companies (e.g. freight shipping companies and banks) often do have those policies. The real issue is not whether those policies are permitted, but what the consequences are for breaking them. The fact that a company forbids its employees from exercising a legal right doesn't mean that the employee ceases to have that legal right. It simply means that if the employee exercises that legal right, then the employee has breached the contract and may suffer the consequences for breaching that contract. Violations of those policies are grounds for termination from employment, and this would probably not be void as a matter of public policy. For an employee at will this is really pretty meaningless, although it could conceivably affect unemployment benefit eligibility. But, for a unionized or civil service employee who can only be fired for cause, this is a big deal. But, in theory, a company policy does not impact the tort liability or the criminal liability of the individual engaging in legally privileged self-defense to anyone. This is because two people can't contractually change their legal duties to third parties with whom they are not in privity (i.e. with whom they do not have a contractual relationship). And two people also can't contractually change the terms of a country's penal laws. The policy may be a defense of the company from vicarious liability for the employee's use of force in violation of the policy that gives rise to civil liability for the employee because the grounds for authorizing self-defense were not present. If the employee using force did so wrongfully and was sued for negligence rather than battery, the existence of the company policy might also go to the issue of whether the employee was acting negligently since a reasonable person in the employee's shoes might have been less likely to wrongfully use force in purported self-defense if there was such a policy than if there was not such a policy (and instead there might arguably have been a legal fiduciary duty as an agent to protect the property and workers of the principal in the absence of the policy).
If someone gave a gift than requested it back is it legal? The request itself is legal, but that does not mean that you have to comply with it. I never promised anything that tied to the tablet. So I'm not sure if it counts as a conditional gift. It does not. An unconditional gift (which initially you did not even want) fails to meet the elements of a cognizable doctrine such as contract, promissory estoppel, fraud, or unjust enrichment. he says he will report the tablet as stolen if I don't return it He might get in trouble if he does that, since he knows or should know that the tablet was never stolen. He gave it away despite your initial refusal(s). As such, he might incur false reporting of a crime.
The issue of who pays directly for the items and/or to contractors is irrelevant. The important thing is to memorialize the agreement/arrangement in writing so as to preempt or solve eventual disputes. A clearly written agreement signed by the parties would supersede any presumption of conditions and rights arising solely from the parties' conduct.
if these questions and answers are found to be legally binding ... They aren’t. Therefore the premise of your question is flawed. It’s like asking “If my dog was a cat ...”. Well, since your dog isn’t a cat we don’t need to hear the rest of the question.
No They will list the price they are charging you. This will normally be greater than what they paid because that’s how business works. The amount they are allowed to charge is what you agreed in your contract with them (which may incorporate a price list) or, if the contract is silent, a reasonable amount. What is reasonable will be related to what the market in your geographical area charges. While this is indirectly related to the input cost of a given item, business can and do charge what the market allows.