Comment by mandevil

8 months ago

Weirdly, there is an exception to fraud if the jury/judge believes that in that situation, no reasonable person would believe what they are saying, it is "mere puffery". This is why some famous, wealthy and powerful people in America today are so hard to catch up on fraud, because they lie so often and so completely that "no one" would really rely on their word. And yet, they are clearly powerful because a lot of people rely on their word.

https://www.bloomberglaw.com/external/document/XC5P9MQG00000...

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mandevil

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mattkrause  8 months ago

“Puffery” isn’t that odd; it’s all about context.

We want people to tell the truth, obviously, but we also don’t want to litigate obvious hyperbole. It should be possible to describe something as “the best thing since sliced bread” without bringing in a whole team of UX researchers and bakery historians to calculate how well sliced bread was received and whether Tide Pods (or whatever) are a big enough improvement to meet that bar.

  • grayhatter  8 months ago

    > It should be possible to describe something as “the best thing since sliced bread” without [...]

    Possible for you, yes. But I think it's perfectly fine to have a different set of rules for different people based on incentives.

    You could bring in a whole team of UX researchers, or a promo copy writer with slightly more originality than sliced white bread. Then they could make a claim or comparison that's trivial to verify. Instead of meaningless obvious (to most people) hyperbole.

    You can't lie to people, and must have some evidence to back up any promotional claim made seems like a reasonable rule for people with a financial incentive to lie or be misleading to the possible detriment of others.

    But if you're really so offended by such a rule, perhaps the solution is "these claims have not been evaluated by [trade industry group] and this product is not intended to treat or cure any disease, missing feature, required business need or other software bug!" Then you can lie as much as any snake oil salesman.