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Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?

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21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?

#21
post #5

wordpress.com's TOS is "available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use" . http://en.wordpress.com/tos/

Using WordPress.com's TOS is a really bad idea (in my view) if sections 11 and 12 are left in their present form. Those sections could get you into the same type of legal trouble as Blockbuster's TOS got them into in 2009, in the Harris v. Blockbuster case. See http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/using-wordpress-coms-terms-of... for a discussion.

I've mentioned this here before, so I hate to sound like a broken record, but it seems worth repeating.

At a minimum, get your lawyer to review very carefully, and edit, the language of those sections.

Re: Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?

#23

I'm surprised "wrote your own" is not in this poll. I've had customers sign up for Pinboard citing the human-readable TOS as a reason for joining.

http://pinboard.in/tos/

Your TOS is more of a sales pitch than an attempt to indemnify yourself against potential legal problems.

Not a bad idea, but it's serving a different purpose than most.

Re: Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?

#25
I think our incorporation, terms of service, and privacy policy cost us two or three grand in total. Money well spent. I sleep better at night not worrying that some thrice copied faulty ToS document, written for another jurisdiction, isn't a sleeping problem.

Re: Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have asked a lawyer this question. His response was: As for copyright over similar disclaimers, we, as attorneys have to use language that is acceptable as far as precedent and current law is concerned, thus, language will often be verbatim. Because of this there are no problems with copyright as far as the terms of use are concerned. The same principle is applied to real estate P&S contracts, as well as constructi…

Cool, thanks!!

Remember that the lawyer in question is not your lawyer. You probably shouldn't take the above (or, in fact, the below - nothing I say is legal advice, nothing in this thread is legal advice) as legal advice.

I am definitely not a lawyer, but that lawyer's response sounds reasonable, but it sounds like it was also likely under a range of conditions -- in particular, I think if you ever get in a position where you have a bit of a "special" contract (i.e., anything unusual in the broad sense of the term) copyright could very well apply.

Re: Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have asked a lawyer this question. His response was: As for copyright over similar disclaimers, we, as attorneys have to use language that is acceptable as far as precedent and current law is concerned, thus, language will often be verbatim. Because of this there are no problems with copyright as far as the terms of use are concerned. The same principle is applied to real estate P&S contracts, as well as constructi…

Cool, thanks!!

FWIW, we're in the middle of dealing with this right now in the UK, and the legal advice we have received is significantly different to that above. Caveat entrepreneur.

My answer to the poll (for these and most other legal documents) is that we produce a serious draft ourselves first, and then take it to a decent lawyer for review.

Our experience has been that asking lawyers (and accountants) to draft documentation from scratch is rarely cost-effective. If they aren't already very familiar with your business, you're just going to get whatever they can throw together in a couple of hours based on a loose understanding of what you do, partly because you're probably not paying for any more than that, and partly because they probably don't have enough detail from your preliminary discussions to produce something better anyway. Then you're effectively going to rewrite much of it yourself just to explain to them how things really work in enough detail to work with, and you're still going to go and see them again afterwards for fine-tuning.

Edit: We do, however, sometimes have a preliminary call/meeting with a lawyer to find out what sorts of headings we ought to be filling out and ask about any tricky areas so we have some understanding before we try to draft anything. But we still do the drafting ourselves, even if it's just a plain English but detailed description of what we want to say that the lawyers can work on later.

Re: Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?

#30
I used the sample privacy policy and terms and conditions provided by Business Link UK See: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=10...

Although, my website is in Australia so I had to customise it to meet the Australian market. See: http://www.ozshaadi.com.au/page/terms and http://www.ozshaadi.com.au/page/privacy

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