It is a responsibility of the individual to follow the laws of her jurisdiction. It is a global project, so we won't be working with every local regulatory body.
Aragon is creating a framework (as an open source project) for running Blockchain companies. We don't provide legal advice nor services, we don't take any responsibility for a hypothetic bad usage of our software.
I think that Solidity is quickly getting ready for prime time and in 2017 we will see tons of very big and high stake projects getting deployed.
That being said, there are already projects like http://rouleth.com that has been managing an over $100k bankroll with no issues for 8 months now.
To sum up, if the needed security measures are taken, you should be good. And we won't be encouraging anyone to run a company with Aragon in production for the next months until proper security audits have been done.
We are still early, but we are now in Alpha stage. We have published a small sneak peek of what we are building on aragon.one so you can try out how managing an Aragon company will be like.
Our ambition is for Aragon to be the backbone of a new generation of companies that will thrive in the new decentralized economy. We have focused on building a modular system, in the frontend and in the smart contracts, so modified versions for specific company types/industries could be build (pe. Aragon for Hedgefunds, Aragon for Non-Profits or Aragon for Open Source projects).
Aragon is a fully decentralized app that only needs having a connection to a Ethereum node in order for the core functionallity to work. We will be packaging it and distributing in a Electron binary for ease of use with non-iniciated users. We have integrated Metamask in Electron, so the app can be standalone (more on this soon).
Even though every screenshot in the website and the demo is live code running against the EVM (via TestRPC) and the alpha is working, we are not open sourcing the contracts for a couple of weeks (some cleaning and refactoring needs to be done before they are ready to be public). All the frontend code will be open source too, but we don't have a specific timeline for this. We are open source first and open source only, our core technology needs to be open source so it can be under the scrutiny needed for Aragon to be a secure technology.
I agree change is not coming in the political front. Lobbying power defending the patent status quo is enormous, and reviewing Patent Law isn't in any political agendas.
Big tech companies take advantage of the system. Microsoft has made billions of dollars out of licensing Android related patents, Apple applied for a paper bag patent recently and Google has "patent parties" when (as I have been told by Google friends) they encourage engineers to work with attorneys in filing patents on anything they worked on that could be patentable.
The curious thing is that patent trolls exist at all because lawyers are so expensive. The reason almost no company can afford to fight patent trolls is because the legal costs are so expensive.
On a related note, I also find it incredible how people can make a living out of these kind of businesses and sleep well at night...
It is always my goto resource when ppl ask about Ethereum.