Personally, I have strong moral objections to getting sued!
Joking aside, morals and ethics determine how a person responds to legal matters, and laws are fundamentally expressions of the morality of the societies that make them in the first place (witness the fact that murder is pretty universally illegal, but when you get right down to the heart of it, the "wrongness" of murder can only be a moral call).
But we have a legion of other threads that discuss the morality vs. legality of this and several other issues. In this case, if we feel some moral pressure to comply with the law, then so what? And if we consider it to be a silly law and go no further than bare compliance, again, so what?
In any case, you're certainly entitled to take whatever view of the policy and how it's worded which seems best to you. We've got what we came up with because we feel it best serves and shields the needs of the community as a whole. As it is, it's hardly over restrictive, so hopefully everyone can
live with it, even if they don't necessarily care to
drink the kool-aid as far as the specific wording or motivating principles go.
In answer to your original and direct question: no it is not the policy of MobileRead to try to only give answers that are legal in the country of the asker. Not so far as I've ever understood it, anyway.
The answers will, ideally, comply with the various relevant laws in as much as it is
possible for them to do so, and very well may carry some sort of disclaimer legalities vary from place to place, but we're
not dense enough to think that people in the U.S. (for instance) will
only read answers to questions that were asked by other people in the U.S., so that sort of silliness would be a waste of effort.
Keep in mind too, that the vast majority of answers around here come from the Community, not the "staff," and we certainly don't try to mind control forum members!
We're still working out some of the details on this ourselves, as the move to Canada is pretty recent and we're all still wrapping our brains around the mess that is copyright law.
In very simple terms: to the best of our ability we won't allow posting of infringing material (as defined by Canadian Laws), nor direct links to same, nor specific instructions for finding same. Nor do we allow posting of or direct linking to tools that can
only be used to break DRM, nor specific instructions for finding or using such tools for breaking DRM -- that bit comes more under the "not getting sued" category than the legality category.
If other stuff comes up that needs to be specifically addressed, or if we get a Cease And Desist notice for something new and exciting, then we'll naturally deal as seems best with those eventualities as they arise, including adjusting the policy's language as needed.
The language was deliberately kept "not too specific" for the purpose of giving us room to deal with such things without having to change the language every five minutes. If we posted a laundry list of "don'ts" then we'd be open to someone saying "well it's not on the list, so why can't I do it?" Besides, who wants to be that pedantic?
I also want to add that, personally, I very much appreciate your concern on this, it's the Community that makes MobileRead what it is, and your interest in this stuff is an excellent example of why that's so.
