Can we answer "Is It Legal to <x>" questions authoritatively?

Question

We've discussed "legal" questions twice before, here and here.

I'd like to drill down specifically into the "Is It Legal" questions that we often seem to receive, such as these:

Legal Lego game

How closely can a game legally resemble another?

How legal would it be to use some elements of the Half Life universe in my non comercial, indie game?

Legality of using names in a game?

How closely can a game legally resemble another?

Could I make my own pokemon game without running into a copyright issue?

I'm not questioning whether these topics are on-topic for a game development site. The boundaries of legal and ethical behaviour certainly are legitimate things that any creative professional needs to know.

What I'm questioning is whether we, as a site that builds up static knowledge as a future resource, are an appropriate place for that knowledge to be generated, stored and then provided for decades into the future to random internet strangers. Unlike the mathematics behind quaternions, laws change over time, and our answers will eventually become invalid, even if those answers were correct at the time they were posted (which doesn't even seem to be particularly common).

Are we willing to live with ourselves if someone acts on an answer we, as a site, have published -- perhaps decades earlier -- and is sued/imprisoned/etc as a result?

Answer 1

I personally am more than happy to see legal questions providing they are directly relevant to game developers.

The idea that only lawyers can possibly have a useful opinion on law is incorrect in 2 ways: firstly, many regular citizens know how their law works, and secondly, many lawyers make mistakes anyway as nobody can possibly know every law on the statute books.

"Are we willing to live with ourselves if someone acts on an answer we, as a site, have published -- perhaps decades earlier -- and is sued/imprisoned/etc as a result?"

Yes, definitely. People need to take responsibility for the advice they accept. When they post on gamedev.stackexchange.com they know they are not asking a legal professional, but even if they were asking a legal professional, the final decision for their actions lies with them. Our best answers are timestamped, sourced with references, and backed up by the community, so the asker can make an informed decision, and what they choose is their responsibility.

Answer 2

From meta.programmers.se

In the context of legal questions, common sense is always, always consult a lawyer. Asking a site devoted to non-lawyers who do not have an attorney-client relationship for definitive legal advice is obviously dangerous.

But that's not to say you can't ask about legal issues: it's akin to asking a colleague or a friend about their experiences in a similar situation.

...

I think there is always going to be a fine line between what constitutes regular, professional advice (on-topic) and what constitutes personal legal advice (off-topic). The standard should be, "would a reasonable person consider the question to be asking for personal legal advice?" If so, it's a candidate for closure.

One footnote regarding common sense: there are askers who appear to have the wrong set of expectations when asking legal questions, and both of the questions you listed appear to have this problem. A person who appears to think Programmers.SE substitutes a lawyer needs to be educated that he cannot use the answers given as a way to circumvent legal council.

To this end, it's similar to questions on Stack Overflow where someone asks how to do something insane, and the only correct answer is "Don't do that. Do X instead."

But the purpose of the Stack Exchange network is to build up questions and answers that can help others, not just the asker. So a misguided asker isn't reason enough to close a question.

Answer 3

Since nobody else has spoken up for the negative yet, I'll take a stab at it.

"Is this legal?" questions do not belong on gamedev.stackexchange.com. We are experts in game development. We are not qualified to publish advice about matters of eternal worldwide legality.

From meta.programmers.se

My opinion: No. They don't have a place here.

If any answer is, or should be, followed up with "... but you need to speak to a lawyer" then the answer is immediately irrelevant. A lawyer, who knows the situation/location (which potentially already makes them too localized as questions) could easily contradict everything in the answer.

All someone is saying is "I think [this], but I'm not a lawyer, so I don't actually know." which is not an answer. At best it's a hypothesis based on experience. At worst, it's bad advice that "sounds right".

From the About Stack Exchange page:

You wouldn’t shout out a calculus question in a football stadium, right? You’d go to the math department of a university. That’s why instead of allowing questions on any topic, we have brought together separate communities of experts on very specific topics.

(...)

All questions on Stack Exchange are expected to be objective and have concrete answers; we’re not a place for conversation, opinions, or socializing. We also expect questions to represent real problems, not just imponderables, hypotheticals, or requests for opinions.

• Stack Exchange is about experts sharing their knowledge by answering questions in their fields of expertise and thereby making the Internet a better place.

• Stack Exchange is not about random people making up answers to questions on topics about which they have no expertise, in an effort to earn popularity points, badges, and access to moderator tools.

Questions of legality do not belong on gamedev.stackexchange.com. In almost all cases they cannot be answered objectively or concretely, and they require expertise which is not possessed by professional game developers; the people we nominally want to attract to the site.

As a practical matter, we cannot provide objectively correct answers to these questions, so we should not permit them on our site. If we keep them, we are only further cluttering the Internet with bad, ill-informed, and silently USA-centric legal advice.

And we're doing it knowingly.

Answer 4

For legal questions if they are general enough

This includes trademark, copyright, and patents.

I think the fact alone that the majority of undergraduate computer science and game development programs cover copyright, trademarks, and patents somewhat bring it into our realm. This site is about voting for correct answers, not determining a type of answer is wrong because of our lack of qualification. The many very useful members who are under 18 here may have a lack of qualification in general, but their experience has proved useful to others.

The voting system exists for a reason. I think we need to realize that we are deciding legal questions are off limits because of our understanding of the law is somewhat odd. We need to avoid "yes you are perfectly safe because you are not breaking copyright of X". That's given.

I learned the basics of copyright, trademarks, and patents in my computer science undergrad, why should I not share this knowledge on a site devoted to game development where it's very relevant. If my answer is wrong, there should be enough people here who also took these types of classes who can down vote me. If it's right, the answers here will likely be the only ones these members get because they can't get a lawyer, even for such trivial questions.

Maybe forcing a disclaimer would be a good idea if it's such an issue. Answering questions about our experience of the business, legal, and marketing side of game development, even though outside our expertise, is not outside our experience.

Answer 5

Against "Is it legal to X" questions:

I like how you spam answers with "your not a lawyer" because of your understanding of the law, nice touch. I do however agree is some respects, just not to the method of spamming answers with -1 and statements like "your not a lawyer (so youre automatically wrong in this case)."

I think the approach of saying every person that answers these legal questions is wrong is a bad idea and such tactics coming from a more veteran member is likely to turn others off from the site because it feels like naive moderation. All of that in respect, I'm just saying what spamming like that looks like for the sake of this site.

I do agree with you, just not for the same reason. The problem here isn't that there is no experience in the copyright and trademarking of games, I along with some other members likely have it and have paid people with qualifications and taken course which explain the legality of software without the legal disclaimers that you're saying are necessary. The problem is that our site as a whole is incapable of determining if the given legal advice is right or wrong. Given the requirements of a stack exchange site's success. Good questions, good answers, and good ratings. This fails the third qualification. So they don't know enough to +1 or -1.

Answer 6

It's important to distinguish between asking legal questions and answering them. People ask them because they want to know the answer to something they don't know or understand. And given the frequency that they occur, legal questions are a fairly common part of the development process for some developers.

From that perspective, people asking questions is very legit in my mind. A question being asked frequently is a symptom of some kind of underlying condition, challenge or issue common to many. To deny people the ability to ask is to deny that there is an underlying issue they are trying to address.

Answering questions, on the other hand, is a whole different matter. That's where you get into the IANAL realm along with the "but you should really ask a lawyer before you decide" caveat. I guess that's an area I'm not sure about. It's almost like you need an official disclaimer for such answers that everyone must use.

Answer 7

It should be noted that providing legal advice without a license to practice law is illegal in most jurisdictions. I'm not certain whether international law has settled which jurisdiction would apply (posters, servers or site owners), however I fear that answering legal questions in any way other then a statement of the law could expose both the site and the user involved to potential criminal action in potentially three different jurisdictions (in a worst possible case scenario).

My vote would lean very much towards shutting down the type of questions - as much fun as they are for me as a law student to look at and speculate over, understanding that to answer them could do damage my future career. At the very least, the questions should be marked by a disclaimer when tagged "legal".

If not shutting them down, StackExchange almost needs to get qualified legal advice itself to see potential for exposure.