2013/1/14 Julian Todd <[email protected]> It is likely that, were we to get into trouble, and had we had got > professional legal advice, they would have told us to keep completely > silent and let them handle everything. Due to the complete lack of > any mention of the case on his blog, it is likely he received and was > keeping to such advice. You have to. The lawyer sets the terms they > will work for you, and will quit if you don't stick to them. Very few > lawyers are hippies enough to be optimistic on the practicalities of > changing the law.
In slight defence of my profession: let me say that it is tricky. Ultimately a lawyer's job is to advise not to tell you what to do. Many lawyers read this as requiring them to advise you to do whatever will minimise any risk to you as a client. It is easy to give risk-minimisation advice. It is much harder to give more nuanced decision theoretic advice which explores more risky possibilities and their outcomes. I try to do that, but it requires a lot more client engagement than a simple "this is what you need to do if you want to be most safe". I am really lucky to have clients with whom I can have that conversation. So, I agree there's some truth in that part of the criticism. I also suspect your analysis is likely to be right. The hard bit for us is the pragmatic part. In reality it might be that scraping (say) the UK Parliament's website and republishing data found there might infringe on copyright or have all sorts of other implications but one could decide that any threats could be fought politically with publicity and so on. In other words one would run a "go ahead, make my day and sue us" type defence. The problem is that a lawyer is never supposed to advise clients to break the law. I can't say to a client that they should go ahead and do something which I know to be unlawful or illegal in some way, even if that's really the most sensible thing for them to do. I can advise them what would happen if they did, but that's as far as it goes. My apologies to anyone who has felt that my profession was overly cautious. -- Francis Davey
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