But a lot of laws have been developed by the actual needs of commerce for millennia so it is clearly a valuable source for possible solutions. But it is still better to start of by analysing the problem from scratch to see if the law is at all sensible or has been twisted by the needs of government. Fraud legalisation is very decent at least here in Sweden. I am not sure how they deal with false marketing in other jurisdiction but here they don’t. False marketing fall under marketing law, false labelling is covered by fraud after a transaction fulfilling the other requirements then just deception has taken place.
you can deceive for the purpose of causing someone a disadvantage…but they might not find it a disadvantage. See what I’m saying. Now if you’re saying that the definition of “fraud” is basically a “no harm, no foul” kind of thing, then I agree.
As for when you said “because he said it was copied” …you can have a situation where they DON’T say something is copied or a cheapened knock-off, bu the customer might still find it valuable, either for the same properties they were originally looking for or because they might find advantage in some of the different qualities the knock-off product has.
This would be nice, if we had the luxury of access to the common law. Unfortunately, the State’s territorial monopoly on law ensures that the vast majority of relevant law is statutory. So, we really don’t know what the common law is in much of the case.