There is no theft as long as the “testers” or whoever are voluntarily installing Honey. The T&C of installing Honey surely includes the right for Honey to see and share the discount codes.
At the scale and resources of Honey the claim of ignorance becomes unreasonable. It would help their case if they had a made a documented good faith attempt, but I think due to the obvious nefarious nature they would have avoided collecting such data because they wanted to continue the practice.
But as mentioned, I’m not sure how illegal it is despite the TOS but it’s clearly wildly unethical.
If the business does not want their codes given out, then they should not agree to Honey’s T&C.
If it was a printed coupon and photocopied it would be obviously illegal, I’m not sure how the digital equivalent would not be illegal. If such a coupon was publicly available then it would be like if honey went and fetched you a new coupon instead of copying an existing one.
Even if the user says they have the right it doesn’t mean they do, and at what point does it become handling stolen goods. Consider a scrap dealer accepting a clearly stolen catalytic converter, would that still be illegal if the scrap dealer did not pay for it? How ‘clearly stolen’ would it have to be to be illegal. What is a reasonable amount of verification?
> Consider a scrap dealer accepting a clearly stolen catalytic converter
Why? I don’t see where the claim is being made that Honey/Paypal is accepting clearly stolen coupon codes.
There are external testers as well as many other reasons to issue one off coupons to third parties. So the presumption that an employee of the company has permission to act as an agent of a company does not apply in such cases.
Consider if I ran a file upload site, someone uploads The Lion King, my software asks them if they have the right to give this to me to distribute, they say yes, I then distribute the upload to many other users who pay me for it. Honey is paid in a round about way but they are still paid.
There is a special holding out as an agent rule where if the uploader was in fact a Disney employee and stated that they acting on the behalf of Disney give you this right. That could get the distributor out of trouble a few times, but on an industrial scale the distributor would lose reasonable tests which are the tests made at the civil court level.
There are three businesses involved. A 3rd party (eg YouTube reviewer) has their affiliate code stripped from the page, and as a result is losing out on income. That may be illegal. And the affiliate doesn’t have a business relationship with honey. They didn’t sign anything away with them.
Also honey was (until recently) marketing themselves as “we find you the best coupon code”. That was & is false advertising, since they were clearly hiding coupon codes they knew about when companies paid them to do so.
Sure but the affiliate (influencer) has an agreement with said business and another affiliate (honey) has an agreement with same said business. It'll be interesting to see if Honey's agreement allows them to do this.
Can even think of it just like HN. You and I don't have an agreement with HN that lets use edit other user's posts. This doesn't mean somebody can't edit other user's posts.