Sneaky sneaky by Amazon, but shouldn’t you guys at eBay have caught this before being told by a user?
“EBay sent a cease-and-desist letter to Amazon on Monday to stop the alleged recruiting practice after determining roughly 50 Amazon sales representatives world-wide sent more than 1,000 messages to sellers on its platform.”
“EBay investigated the matter after a seller alerted the company about 10 days ago of someone using the messaging system on eBay’s site to convince this seller to move to Amazon.”
“To avoid detection, messages sent by Amazon sales reps stayed generic and frequently used hyphens or periods between letters to describe the rival company, including a-m-a-z-o-n or A.M.Z.N., the cease-and-desist letter alleges. They also spelled out email addresses and phone numbers to avoid automated detection meant to prevent sharing contact information, eBay claims in the letter said.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ebay-accuses-amazon-of-illegally-poaching-sellers-1538572210
EBay Accuses Amazon of Illegally Poaching Sellers 
WSJ
comments
Also: bizexec@microsoft: Is it true that MS includes Office as "Cloud market share" to prove Azure growth? Is that why they renamed VSTS "Azure DevOps" too?
They recently rebranded it:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/?&OCID=AID736750_SEM_T09nVtr6
I've used it in previous companies as VSTS and use it for personal development.
That's right. You'll find them on UberEats.
In reality it was probably just a few dumbass sales reps trying to meet their numbers. Amazon as a whole is incapable of coordinating anything anymore. We all just kinda do stuff and try to get promos
Taking every possible advantage in business is just intelligent. Like uber used to do.
Brand image is turning out to be kind of a thing these days. *shrug*
https://legaldictionary.net/civil-law/
I have multiple legal cases pending against others in civil court.
For engineers who deal in code all day, you'd think that would transfer to legal code. Professor Lessig even wrote a book about such overlap.
When you violate a contract, it's called a breach of contract.
That creates a legal cause of action.
You go to court over it. For a legal opinion and a legal order.
The courts use common or civil law (jurisdiction depending) to decide the issue, based on laws and legal reasoning per their civil law framework.
In the U.S./English common law system, they examine case law, in addition to any rules or statutes written in a code, plus any charter or constitutions.
The crux is that you want to define "illegal" as only those things that are written in a statute. That's not just wrong, it's not even enough, since there are tons of jurisdictions that have made those very laws you say don't exist.
Contract law, in addition to originating in common law, also frequently has overlap with statutes, as legislatures wade in to clarify their position on changes that should be made to law. The concept of "breach of contract" itself is a common law concept.
There thus is most definitely law that prohibits contract breach. The law covers how to determine remedies as well when an illegal breach occurs.
The foundation of the requirement to comply with the contract is rather simple: in common law you have a legal duty to perform in good faith.
In fact, all U.S. States have adopted the uniform commercial code. All of the contracts under it have a duty of good faith:
"Uniform Commercial Code Section 1-304 which provides that “every contract or duty within this Act imposes an obligation of good faith in its performance or enforcement”."
(see https://legalknowledgeportal.com/2017/02/09/the-implied-duty-of-good-faith-in-commercial-contracts-and-its-impact-on-deferred-consideration-clauses-in-corporate-sale-and-purchase-agreements/ )
Fortunately UCITA was never adopted widely, but I believe it would have covered service agreements such as this. That was an attempt to add some computer concepts to the UCC, filling gaps.
So while there's no widely passed specific written law against the particular form of agreement, since it doesn't appear to be part of the UCC, there is still a common law duty to perform the provisions of a contract in good faith.
As such, it's cleary in contravention of law -- specifically common law.
If you don't understand this yet, just read it from Harvard Law Review:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1340584
(In actual England, their common law is reluctant to be so clear -- https://www.fenwickelliott.com/research-insight/annual-review/2016/principle-good-faith-english-law "England stands out as one of the few jurisdictions that does not recognise a universal implied duty of good faith between contracting parties:" (see legalknowledgeportal link above))
So your characterization that there is no law against a breach of contract is a misunderstanding of the duty to perform in good faith.
You could google it and see that your argument was tried and failed even in the top result: https://www.quora.com/How-should-a-breach-of-contract-be-qualified-is-it-illegal-is-it-against-the-law
The first answer sums it up best, "To approach the first question last, the generally-accepted definition of "illegal" is an act that violates the law. While you are correct that there are not statutes that specifically define breach of contract (outside a commercial setting, the Uniform Commercial Code does exist for those situations) as "illegal", it would still be such as a common law matter."
When you argue for non-existence, you should make at least some basic effort to search first.
I rest my case.
The issue is that some lawyers argue that some duties which have no inherent penalties, even though penalties for the results that violate the duty, are not illegal in themselves.
But it's the not-legal non-compliance with the duty that has ramifications that must be compensated for that are at issue. If it were not a duty, the ramifications could harm somebody, but there would be no need to compensate.
Such as if I took your business without violating your terms of sevice. You lose, but it's not a cause of action.
"illegal" means something is a violation of the law.
Think about this the other way around.
Some illegal things have no punishment due to official discretion. An officer sees you speeding, illegally, but they see your wife is in labor and you are rushing her to the hospital (not that it's necessary to rush, but this is an old trope). They escort you the rest of the way with lights and sirens rather than ticket you.
In many places, no cop pulls people over for going 3 miles over. Or even 9 miles over. Discretion is used all the time.
Did you commit an illegal act? Of course. There were no consequences, but the act is not legal.
The same situation can occur. You can even write in fees for a contract breech for the cost of investigation, to see if there were resultant damages, leading to immediate damages inherently.
Just because some lawyers repeatedly fail to follow their argument to its absurdity, doesn't make them correct.
It may even make sense for clients to do those illegal acts to reduce their overall costs. That's why companies will murder others with e.g. toxic dumping if they know the costs to pay off a few people is less than their profits.
In that case it's also illegal and also has negative penalties that are overall positive for the company.
Do they have a fiduciary duty to do the illegal thing? Fiduciaries are actually constrained by the law, but they sometimes end up in a choice of two evils. In that case, fiduciaries have to decide what is the lesser evil. Lesser evilism is encoded in a number of statutes, and if they didn't they can be prosecuted for the worse evil.
For example, use of force statutes will often let you make a choice to kill one person if you avoid the killing of two people and have no other choices. The trolley problem is written right into code (this has ramifications for e.g. driverless cars).
Then that leads to the question if affirmative defenses successfully invoked make it so the original crime was "illegal." It's still illegal, but it's excused in the case of an affirmative defense. Some affirmative defenses are statutes of limitations. Does running from the law long enough to run out the clock make an action no longer illegal?
Of course not. Kavanaugh's doing illegal behavior while drunk is still illegal, and the public understands this.
This discussion is one reason why lawyers are losing a lot of trust today in our society. Many of them have no sense of duty or honor, and are just out to argue incoherent technicalities and some lawyers don't want to call something they can minimize penalties for as "illegal" because they want their clients to feel good about their dutiless behavior.
To the rest of us, our word is our bond and we act in good faith.
They can't detect phone numbers with dots in them?...