Merge Software Law, Intellectual Property Law into Law

Question

Proposal: Merge Software Law and Intellectual Property Law into Law & Legal questions

The reason why I think they should be merged is that they form a hierachy

1. Law
   1. IP Law (merge Software into IP also proprosed)
      1. Software Law

I am sure that tags can successfully be used to classify the questions.

The top level (Law & Legal questions) has not that much momentum yet. I'm not sure it makes sense to create a specialized (software) forum when a more general one (Law) does not exist yet.

Answer 1

I'm strongly in favor into merging software law into IP law because “software law” isn't a topic delineation used by experts in the topic; it doesn't make sense as a site topic.

I'm weakly in favor of an all-encompassing law site. Law is huge, with major subdivisions (both by field and by locale). Each subfield of law has its own very separate set of “prosumers”: employers and employees for labor law, authors and inventors for IP law, homeowners for real estate law, … On the flip side, the subdivisions are fairly easy to tag for, as long as the community carefully enforces the presence of field and locale tags.

Answer 2

Well, I do have to disagree on whether subsets should be created before supersets: in some cases it does make sense. In this case, however, I am inclined to agree: this will create competing communities and competing data sets, meaning that there is a much higher probability of duplicate questions and duplicate answers (something that SE was created to avoid).

Personally, I think that by combining them, it is more likely that a stronger community will form faster.

Answer 3

I agree. While there are lawyers that specialize in specific fields of practice, I think if the success of SO is anything to judge by, having a single community for all legal professionals/exprts and those interested in legal issues would be ideal. It can then be up to individual users as to which tags they want to keep an eye on.

There will still be some overlap with other communities (e.g. Startups will have users asking legal questions related to startups, and Programmers will have questions about software law), but this merge would minimize duplicate questions and has a much greater chance of gaining traction.

Answer 4

I couldn't agree more. There has to be a way of classifying legal context. In law there is no such thing as international, in most places there is no such thing as 'Software Law' and in a few theres no such thing as 'Intellectual Property'. It doesn't exist.

'Software law' is kind of a redundant notion i.e trying to enforce those little 'I agree to the terms &..' boxes in a lot of countries is a pointless effort to embark on and will do nothing except run up legal fees. As with all law it's an interpretation based upon historical context, enforceability and so many other factors. As a developer, would I like to see a S.E. site which covers this, absolutely! But I don't think that this is the right classification and I suspect that this proposal is mostly driven by developers and would seem odd to most lawyers who work across jurisdictions. Generally, software is a subset of IP/copyright & patent which can only be applied per-jurisdiction save for where treaties are signed and enforced, each country will choose to interpret that however they decide. I posted this discussion here which has a feature request which I really hope you can support: Law broken into classifications/jurisdictions

StackOverflow's pedigree means that a more general 'Legal' site would be heavily weighted to IP/Software law questions, however I think that we should do what S/O did with programming languages. I sometimes answer questions about PHP, CSS, Javascript, HTML5 ActionScript and could probably help a novice with 5 or 6 other languages but I'd certainly say that I specialize in only a few. The same should be the case for law, but here's the rub: we are used to there being an international standard, if I write code in thailand it's going to do the same thing as in France (shut up about charsets ;-).. In law.. forget it, there must be jurisdictions as categories as well as the normal tagging system or else we will have people thinking that U.S. or E.U law somehow has any relevance at all where the poster is from.

Answer 5

I am a law student, graduating in a few days. I definitely think Software law should merged into Intellectual Property law. "Software law" doesn't exist. Most legal questions involving software can be subsumed into IP law. I think merging the two could also help tip the scales for IP law to go into beta.