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Currently StackOverflow is celebrating their 10 millionth question. They are randomly distributing a total of 400 t-shirts among participants, over a period of one month. Participation is done by either tweeting under a certain hashtag, or putting the corresponding hashtag on your SO user page.

I looked all over the announcement page and didn't see any mention of terms and conditions, and this got me wondering. As a non-US citizen, I'm used to seeing online contests from US-based companies excluding non-US participants from being eligible winners because of the various localized rulings on what constitutes a legal lottery.

Which legal issues should you be expecting, when organizing a giveaway like this one without terms and conditions?

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freekvd
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    Are you literally asking what legal issues we should expect? Or which could we expect? I shouldn't and don't expect any. It's t-shirts. Those online contests you are used to seeing probably had prizes worth more than x dollars or some other quirk that created greater-than-threshold risk for the legal department. All of that said, there may be a jurisdiction which has a rule that ANY sweepstakes (giveaway) must have accompanying t&c with at least some minimal boilerplate language. Since I am not aware of this rule I'll probably end up in court with my client. – jqning Sep 03 '15 at 14:26
  • @jqning since you're basically answering your own question I'll go with that answer. The more likely the occurrence, the more relevant it is to answer the question. If none are relevant, I'd like to learn why. – freekvd Sep 03 '15 at 15:09
  • As a general rule, in the USA, if you don't have to give anything of value to win, it's not regulated as a lottery. Games of knowledge, for instance, are also different from games of chance. – Upnorth Sep 12 '17 at 04:16
  • Should be discussed on Meta – usr-local-ΕΨΗΕΛΩΝ Jan 08 '18 at 13:13

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