legal, taxes, sales, business-registration, incorporationNote: This question is attracting answers that simply provide sources to research from. As I mentioned in the question below, I am not looking for research sources but rather a place where a person who is well versed in relevant law can specifically tell me what it is that I need to do. If this doesn’t exist, then say so but please back it up with something more than “I have never heard of something like that.”
I am a computer programmer and I am interested in selling software online. If I begin doing so, I want to be very certain that all legal aspects of what I am doing are handled correctly. Unfortunately, I do not have thousands of dollars to spend on a lawyer. As governments generally want their laws followed, I imagine that they provide sources to find out what the laws are (as it is impossible to follow a law without knowing what it is (not that this is an excuse to break laws, but, it is a problem to be solved before going into business)). Am I correct about this? If so, where can I access such information for free? If I need to pay, the maximum I could afford is around US$100-$200 and I have many questions so I doubt that that would be sufficient to hire a good lawyer.
Some of the specific questions I have are (I am including these not to get answers for them from here, but, rather to give an idea of the sort of questions I have):
I have done a fair bit of research in the legal aspect of running a business (which is how I know I even need to consider some of the above questions), but, as with many things the saying “You don’t know what you don’t know” likely applies to law as much as anything else. Since it can go terribly wrong to break laws, I want to make sure that I get complete information from someone who knows the law well to prevent anything bad from happening.
NOTE: I am in the United States and I am interested in both U.S. law and international law as it applies to my selling the software to those in other countries.
Introduction
As software developers, we sometimes have a hard time understanding how it’s possible that topics as procedural and algorithmic in nature as law and tax are not readily and definitively outlined online. We have become comfortable with resources like StackOverflow that seem to have the canonical answer to any software development question. In the unlikely scenario a programming topic has not yet been addressed, there is a massive community of experts at-the-ready, mouse pointers on the refresh button, tabs with standard library references open – ready to do battle for an up-vote or two and that ever-elusive green-checkmark.
This is not so in the world of legal information.
Access to Law in the United States
In the United States, access to legal information is a racket (see definition 4). The legal education market is controlled by the American Bar Association cartel which restricts legal education to a select few, highly antiquated, and ridiculously expensive graduate programs they protect with barriers that keep most from having any sort of legal education. If that were not enough, the economics of attending anything but one of the absolute top law schools are difficult to justify. The inability of many law students to get a job upon graduation leaves many law school graduates doing something other than practicing law and the few that do find work with much less competition.
Beyond the barriers to a legal education, there are even greater barriers to accessing the law. There are two companies that provide excellent access to statutes and case law: LexisNexis and Westlaw. (Yes, there are others, but none are as comprehensive.) Each of these companies will sell individual attorneys limited access to their databases (usually for the laws in one state) for around $500 per month (give or take $100 depending on how good the lawyer was at negotiating the agreement). Many lawyers get around these fees by using legal libraries often found at law schools. However, these libraries are almost always limited to lawyers, judges, and law students.
All jurisdictions (which are generally counties), have their own sets of case law. Some provide a crippled version for public access (usually through a contract with LexisNexis) which shows only the most basic meta information related to cases.
All law in the United States is in the public domain. One might therefore think this information would be easily accessible to the pubic. Unfortunately, it’s not. Let’s take, for example, the federal PACER public legal access system which allows anyone access to federal court documents for 10 cents per page (an absurd amount to pay for electronic documents). Some people worried about the lack of pulic access to law created browser plugins that would automatically capture pages accessed using PACER into a publically accessible database. The courts have responded harshly to this plugin, forbidding its use in some cases. Even the FBI got invovled after Aaron Swartz (the founder of Reddit who commited suicide because of the actions of an overzealous federal prosecutor) added 2.7 million pages (less than 1% of the PACER system) to the free archive. Again, we’re talking about information in the public domain here. As Reason eloquently put it, we’re dealing with a system and old boys’ club “as archaic as a barrister’s wig.”
So don’t be surprised that you, as a member of the public, don’t have access to the law.
So Should Startups Just Give Up?
No!
There are some good sources of legal information out there. As Daniel Anderson mentioned, Nolo publications are a wonderful source of legal information. I am a big fan of their books. In my personal library I keep and updated copy of:
Unfortunately, there is not much out there written in layman’s terms beyond what Nolo publishes; there are a few, but not many.
If you want to go beyond what Nolo offers (short of going to law school), you can always search online for law school syllabi on particular topics. Those always have the texts used in a course which you can purchase (at a fair substantial cost as they are text books) and review.
If you want to go further, you’ll have to consider law school. There are a few relatively inexpensive online law schools mostly in California (which is the only state you’ll be able to practice after being a student at one of these schools). I know of business people who enroll in St Francis School of Law (perhaps the best regarded of the non-ABA programs) because they want to understand law but do not want to be attorneys.
Beyond that, you have to go to an ABA-accredited law school. (As you may have guessed, they don’t allow programs that are completely online.)
Anyway, I hope this helps you to understand why it’s not so easy to get access to legal information and why it’s generally in people’s best interests to hire a lawyer. Our society does not provide quality access to law and your options are either to invest your time heavily into studying the law or to hire an attorney.
My best advice: Read the Nolo books and then consult with an attorney. You’ll save a small fortune in consultation fees and you’ll be a much smarter legal consumer.
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