Can you prevent AT&amp;T from raising prices by making such suggestion? As per the recent news (LA Times: Contact AT&amp;T's CEO, hear back from his lawyer), making suggestions to AT&amp;T as an existing lifelong customer results in escalation to their legal dept, which subsequently sends the suggestion back to the suggester, with the lawyer articulating that the company respectfully declines to consider said suggestion. &quot;AT&amp;T has a policy of not entertaining unsolicited offers to adopt, analyze, develop, license or purchase third-party intellectual property ... from members of the general public,&quot; Restaino said. &quot;Therefore, we respectfully decline to consider your suggestion.&quot; This prompted the rival T-Mobile US' CEO to run a twitter campaign to publicly collect such declined suggestions (even issuing an official press release — https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news/att-customer-ideas-welcome.htm). .@ATT &amp; #Randall are nuts. If they don’t want your ideas, we’ll take them! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #Uncarrier is about listening/improving for customers! Following the logic explained by AT&amp;T in the latimes article, that people could later sue if a suggestion is acknowledged and implemented, one of the customers sent a suggestion to AT&amp;T to raise prices by 10 dollars per month, and proactively claimed to assert the intellectual property rights over such suggestion in the same letter (the tweet was fav'ed by Legere for the apparent humour). Would a suggestion to raise prices by 10 dollars per month prevent AT&amp;T from doing so, without subjecting itself to the possibility of a legal action from the suggester? (If not, is that only because the suggestion is too trivial, or are there other reasons as well?) If mere customer suggestions could really result in legal action if acknowledged and implemented, how come John Legere openly takes and implements suggestions from his customers, boasting about such practice in every one of his interviews, without any news of any suggestion-based lawsuits or settlements taking place? Likewise, I've heard of many stories about startups taking suggestions from their first customers (whether corporate or individual ones) without giving back anything other than better service for same price. (This advice itself came as a suggestion at one of the startup talks about how to successfully start a business — it was explicitly advertised that employees of your customers will volunteer their company time and expretise to make sure you're successful if you can solve problems they want solutions for, without asking for anything in return other than the ability to purchase such solution (on the open market).) Are such startups opening the door for later lawsuits for equity from the people who gave the suggestions?
There is no IP in ideas! There is copyright in writing it down - they can't use your exact words without permission. However, sending it to them in the form of a suggestion would give them a pretty much unassailable argument that you have given them an implicit licence. You can patent an invention (not an idea), claim IP in a trade mark (also, not an idea), register a design (again, not an idea) and hold copyright in an artistic work (once more, not an idea). They are required to keep confidences but offering them a suggestion probably doesn't count as supplying confidential information. I can see no risk in acting on customer suggestions. Hence, the idea to raise prices can be acted on or not at the discretion of the company.
In general you can dispute and negotiate any bill from a professional. The stronger your arguments for disputing it, and the more coherent your demands for adjustment, the more successful you will tend to be. This is like any business negotiation. One partner at a very large U.S. law firm once admitted to me that their corporate clients almost always ask for &ndash; and receive &ndash; billing adjustments. Of course, when push comes to shove, unless you're accusing the lawyer of fraudulent billing, then typically by contract you are liable for the bills. However, non-lawyers often assume that they will lose any dispute with their lawyers because it seems like lawyers have free access to the legal system. The reality is that there is a significant threshold that must be met before a law firm will sue a client for payment. That threshold will depend on the firm's opportunity costs, the costs of litigation, their assessment of reputational risks, how much they expect to actually collect, and sometimes just how ticked off they are.
Terms in a contract that are not legal or not enforcable are quite capable of causing you trouble and costing you time or money, most likely a generous amount of both. Your friend shouldn't care one bit about whether these terms would be legal and/or enforcable. If he doesn't like them, then he MUST NOT accept the changed contract. Not if these terms are illegal and unenforceable and of course even less if they are legal and enforceable. I would write back "I believe that the suggested change in terms is illegal and would be unenforceable. I also believe that the change is deeply unfair towards me and creates a considerable legal risk that I am not willing to accept under any circumstances. I therefore strongly reject your suggested change. "
If you have an agreement with a company that specifies &quot;you agree to give me something of value, in case I give you something of value&quot;, you have a contract. In order for there to be a contract, there has to be actual acceptance of the offer. You can put out on a web page some contract stating those terms, and if you get positive acceptance of the contract (hence the standard click-through technology), then as long as you have done the thing promised, you can bill them for doing the thing promised. It's not clear what thing of value you are offering on the web page, since it's not &quot;doing actual work&quot;. Them sending you an email isn't you doing something. One thing you could do is block all incoming emails, and for money you agree to unblock emails from registered subscribers. Just announcing that you will bill anyone for emailing you does not create a contract, because the emailer need not have even seen your announcement. This is why e-contracts need a click-through button. It's legal to request money, but there is no legal obligation for them to comply. That will be $10, please.
Yes and no. [note, the following is all written about US law. In other jurisdictions laws are, of course, different (though usually not drastically so.)] In the US there are (at least) three different bodies of law that might apply to code: copyright, patents, trade secrets. Copyright covers original expression. Anything you write is automatically, immediately protected under copyright. The copyright applies to the code itself, and anything "derived" from that code. It's up to the courts to decide exactly what "derived" means. One case that's long been viewed as a landmark in this area is Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemicals. The Court of Appeals for the tenth Circuit decision includes a section titled: "The Test for Determining Whether the Copyright of a Computer Program Has Been Infringed." Note that you can register a copyright, and that can be worthwhile, such as helping recover some damages you can't otherwise. Patents are quite different from copyrights. Where a copyright covers expression of an idea, a patent covers a specific invention. Rather than being awarded automatically, a patent has to be applied for, and awarded only after the patent office has determined that there's no relevant prior art to prevent it from being awarded. A patent, however, covers things like somebody else independently discovering/inventing what's covered by the patent. A trade secret could (at least theoretically) apply to some process or procedure embodied in the code. A trade secret mostly applies to a situation where (for example) you're trying to form an alliance with some other company, and in the process tell them things you don't tell the general public. If you've identified the fact that what you're telling them is a trade secret, and they then tell a competitor (or the general public, etc.) or more generally use that information in any way other than the originally intended purpose, it could constitute a trade secret violation. As a side-note: patents and copyright fall under federal law, so they're basically uniform nation-wide. Trade secrets mostly fall under state law, so the exact details vary by state. Absent a reason to believe otherwise, I'd guess your interest here is primarily in copyright infringement. The key here would be showing that one piece of code was derived from the other. That is, it specifically would not apply in a case where there were only a limited number of ways of doing something, so anybody who wanted to do that had to use one of those ways. Since this would not indicate actual derivation, it would not indicate copyright violation.
The RIAA changed their litigation strategy in the late 2000s and it (and its members) generally no longer sue individuals. See https://hbr.org/2008/12/why-the-riaa-stopped-suing If you're just asking for a prediction about whether Tenenbaum or Thomas-Rasset would be sued today if they were to impermissibly make copyrighted music available to the public again, my preduction would be no. But I have to say this is an odd prediction to ask us to make. And I wouldn't have much to argue against somebody who predicts the other direction.
According to the FTC which is the main U.S. federal government agency charged with administering federal anti-trust laws: Can prices ever be &quot;too low?&quot; The short answer is yes, but not very often. Generally, low prices benefit consumers. Consumers are harmed only if below-cost pricing allows a dominant competitor to knock its rivals out of the market and then raise prices to above-market levels for a substantial time. A firm's independent decision to reduce prices to a level below its own costs does not necessarily injure competition, and, in fact, may simply reflect particularly vigorous competition. Instances of a large firm using low prices to drive smaller competitors out of the market in hopes of raising prices after they leave are rare. This strategy can only be successful if the short-run losses from pricing below cost will be made up for by much higher prices over a longer period of time after competitors leave the market. Although the FTC examines claims of predatory pricing carefully, courts, including the Supreme Court, have been skeptical of such claims. Q: The gas station down the street offers a discount program that gives members cents off every gallon purchased. I can't match those prices because they are below my costs. If I try to compete at those prices, I will go out of business. Isn't this illegal? A: Pricing below a competitor's costs occurs in many competitive markets and generally does not violate the antitrust laws. Sometimes the low-pricing firm is simply more efficient. Pricing below your own costs is also not a violation of the law unless it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses. In markets with a large number of sellers, such as gasoline retailing, it is unlikely that one company could price below cost long enough to drive out a significant number of rivals and attain a dominant position. Most (if not all) states also have parallel state anti-trust laws which sometimes prohibit conduct that is not prohibited by federal anti-trust laws, although the overlap between the two is substantial.
First of all, this assumes that the debt consolidation firm would be willing to buy, and the CC company willing to sell. With a trial already scheduled, this might well not be the case. Secondly, when (if) the debt consolidation firm buys the debt, they buy the rights of the seller. In many states the trial could go forward, with the debt consolidation firm substituted as plaintiff. It is not automatic that a sale of the debt would postpone the legal case. Certainly if this happened once, it seems very unlikely that a second debt consolidation firm would buy the debt from the first. And as the comments by Moo and ohwilleke suggest, such a scheme would be fraudulent and criminal, if discovered. It might also constitute contempt of court for intentionally abusing the process of the court. Not a good or safe idea.