Meh, if everyone listened to their lawyer we wouldn't have YouTube or BitTorrent :)

I wouldn't suggest you listen to them blindly, but you're crazy if you think YouTube didn't ask actual attorneys for a risk assessment (their VCs would have required that). They certainly didn't ask a bunch of hackers.

For those who've never heard of this gem :)

Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do. ~ J. P. Morgan

haha :)

Attorneys are expensive, Hacker News is free.

Attorneys know what they're talking about where law is concerned, hackers don't but often don't realize that. Asking a hacker for legal advice is just as bad as asking a lawyer for programming advice. Actually it's probably worse, since nobody ever ended up in jail for a coding error.

How do you know some readers here don't read Supreme Court decisions because they're interested in law, even if they never went to law school? How do you know your lawyer doesn't hack on Arc on weekends? :)

Seriously, though: of course the person asking the question should retain a lawyer for definitive guidance. However, asking around to get a feel for the opinions of intelligent people makes sense, too. It might, at the very least, clarify the questions, and it will help detect if the lawyer's words make sense. While attorneys are valuable, they are also fallible, and their advice should be as critically considered as any other.

Well, an attorney's opinion on the law is certainly not infallible, but it should be considered a lot less critically than a hacker's.

The danger is that misinformation is often worse than no information at all, and asking a bunch of non-attorneys for legal advice is sure to net you a ton of it.

Oh, but we wish they did sometimes :)

This should seriously be in the FAQ somewhere - We've seen a lot of it lately, and it's kind of surprising the ideas that some otherwise very bright people have when it comes to the law.

Absolutely, it's ridiculous to pose legal questions here. If I were running the place I'd probably remove them. It's actually dangerous to both the poster (whose business could be ruined by misinformation) and those who respond.

That's true.

But some answers are so blazingly obvious or common knowledge that it's worth asking. It might at least speed up a conversation with a lawyer saving many hundreds of $s.