I'm inclined to agree with Tom Brossman's comment:

You are asking a legal question, talk to a lawyer.

The question is asking for a definitive legal opinion and to my knowledge, there are no practising lawyers giving legal advice here on AU. I mean, there are plenty of people who offer their opinion (I know I certainly do) but I haven't seen anybody here staking their professional reputation on their legal opinions.

The question is also without geographical scope as John S Gruber points out. "Legal" changes violently when you cross borders.

So yes, it's unanswerable at the moment unless you can find me a lawyer practising in every legal state in the world, who specialises in this area of law, who wants to put their neck on the line. If you can, I'll reopen it in a heartbeat.

I don't know. On one side:

• Is a legal question answerable if you're not asking where it's legal?
• Is it canonically answerable by anybody but a lawyer practising in that area?
• As it stands, those assertions require somebody who is licensed to practice law in every legal municipal in the world.

But as you say, we have coped with with a number of legal questions already, and it would probably be silly to close down everything that we cannot currently answer.

I feel the answer is probably not going to as black and white as you might like. Some suggestions for best practices:

• Licensing (including criminal copyright, surrounding tort contract law and license interpretation) is on-topic. Everything else is off-topic. Am I excluding anything important with that?

• Questions and answers should state their jurisdiction.

• If they don't we assume a washy-international EU/US jurisdiction but answers should still give specific answers when possible.

• People probably aught to disclaim every answer with IANAL, or "This is by no means a professional, legal opinion. If you need one of those please seek the council of a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction." It might be nice if the powers-that-be made it so whenever the legal tag was applied to a question, that text was immediately applied.

  This isn't for the liability of the answerer or the site (the legal section disclaims Stack Exchange, but arguably not the users) but more the users. People are becoming dependent on Google to make all sorts of decisions that they shouldn't be making without asking a professional. As editors and maintainers of the site, it's our job to keep them safe too if we can.