The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Preserving website content asks about the legality of maintaining private copies of web sites in order to protect against the possiblity that a new domain owner puts up a robots.txt invalidating access to old content stored in the archive (or causing it to be deleted).
Given that legality questions by definition are localized (they are both only relevant to a small geographic area -- one political area, such as a country or in some cases smaller areas -- and a specific moment in time -- since laws change all the time), do we consideer them on topic on DP.SE?
I would argue that based on the established definitions, legality questions by definition are off topic.
Michael Kjörling
Per meta.so, "too localized" is more about having a discrete focus too narrow to be interesting to the site's users. The operative word, then, would be the "too" because "localized" by itself is all right.
If a series of similar questions arise for laws in every world country, I can see the rationale for closing as too localized, but if the jurisdiction is limited to a reasonable area, the nature of making copies (ownership, copyright) and digital archiving are too intertwined to reject all legal questions outright, especially on the basis of the "too localized" flag.
Too localized makes sense, but I would think about just straight up calling such questions off-topic, if for no other reason than it's what we did at The Workplace SE and it allowed us to put a clear statement in our FAQ that (most) people understand immediately:
If a question requires a lawyer to answer it, we can't help. These situations are simply too specific and too complex to definitively answer on our site.
Because SE sites are about practical, answerable questions, and anything related to the law is often both too localized in terms of location and case specifics, and unanswerable unless someone is a lawyer (who probably would be careful to answer in ways that did not constitute actual legal advice), we declared questions off-topic to avoid discussions as to why things are/are not localized, can/cannot be suitably answered by a lawyer, etc.
(Source: I was an original Workplace moderator)
No, please do not close these questions on the basis of "too localized". You still need to decide if the subject is on topic at all. But too localized has been widely (mis)used to close just about any question that mentions a place or time. An entire country, city, state or any legal jurisdiction is not too localized. The timeframe for a law in force is not too localized.
Too localized was designed for questions that cannot possibly be answered because the situation is so… sooooooo unique that :
For the most part, just ignore the "too localized" close reason. You'll know when it is needed. But we're working on some closed-question changes that will mitigate this issue.