Comment by pera
13 days ago
> I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.
I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law
And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024:
I very much don't believe for a second anyone would manage to get a judgement against them on this in the UK.
For starters, the language is highly subjective, and they'd be able to show vast amounts of discourse about software engineering where "from scratch" often does not involve starting with nothing, and they'd then go on to argue that the person suing haven't actually had any reason to believe that they would be able to replicate a setup that was described as a complex large-scale experiment without much more information.
The person suing would have an uphill battle showing that whatever assumptions they made were something that was reasonable to infer based on that statement.
And to have a case, a consumer would also then need to have relied on this as a significant factor in choosing to buy their services.
But even if we assume the court would agree it is fraudulent, the remedy is only "directly consequential losses".
In other words, I doubt anyone would lose sleep over this risk.