Ethereum (the company) is not offering any equity for sale, so I doubt they are afoul of any laws. They are asking for donations, and in exchange for donations they will be handing out widgets and wingdings. Those widgets and wingdings may or may not end up being worth any money. That's the risk you take.
FWIW, I'm seeing "$36 million" thrown around a lot in this thread. At today's BTC prices ($800), assuming Ethereum raises the maximum of 30,000 BTC, that would be $24 million.
The great thing about open source software is that anybody can modify it and create a "fork." Some people are suggesting that investors are fools, because as soon as the client is released, people will just fork a "free" version of the client and reap all the benefits. You're partially right...the client will undoubtedly be copied and forked by enterprising individuals. But hasn't the same thing happened to the bitcoin client? Yet the underlying value of "the real thing" hasn't diminished as a result.
On a side note, I've been lurking on this forum for months...I originally started mining LTC in December and then switched to middlecoin and began following that thread, which introduced me to bitcointalk.org. I was initially overwhelmed by the volume of information and helpfulness of the members, but then I noticed that many threads (especially the middlecoin thread) quickly devolved into flamewars. It's really sad to see a place with such potential devolve so quickly. It's like going to Wikipedia and searching for a topic, only to find that there's a 50/50 chance you'll be presented with vulgar bathroom graffiti instead of the article you wanted. With the current state of internet forums, it's a wonder that Satoshi himself wasn't flamed into oblivion before he even released the first line of code.
Donations...lol the way you are carefully choosing select choice words make it seem like they are trying the best they can to appear legal. I'm very confident they are breaking a ton of laws, I don't care how you want to phrase the investments. We all know what they are doing, what I'm asking anyone who wants to invest is where is all the transparency and why have they not filed with the SEC? There is a lot of suspicious behaviour and commenting going on in this message board. If someone came to your home and asked you to invest 200,000 and showed you a youtube video and a message board ad would you give it to him? No, fawk no you wouldn't, you want financials, business plan. background checks the whole nine yards. That's the minimum,. forget the fact that this is just another coin and there will be hundred more like this popping up every month until the crypto hype dies. What I want to know is why would anybody be against more disclosure, more information, detailed business plan, financials, background checks on these individuals. Who would argue against that for an entity that is trying to raise up to 36 million? Who would question the need for more transparency and compliance with regulations? Weird shit going on here.