Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48910

by picnichouse • 19 years ago

19 14 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What do you think? I see it done all over the place...

onceageek3• 19 years ago

I don't see any issue with copying the terms. Most of all End-user agreements and service policy are similar. Pay attention to substituting your company's name :)

weebro• 19 years ago

What is your alternative; get a lawyer to draw them up? Where do you think they get them from? Only 10% of legal documents are drawn up from scratch. Lawyers have a service called Westlaw. This service allows them to copy entire briefs/submissions made to the court by a lawyer in the past. They don't even need to come up with what to say in court, they just copy the person who was successful in the past. I spent 18 months in a NY law firm cutting and pasting.

IF IT AIN'T BROKE.....

My advice, take it from many websites, piece together the bits you want and use examples from other sites for different ways of saying the same thing. Change its wording slightly and put the sentences back to front sometimes. If it's altered, not in the same format and slightly different it's ok.

jey2• 19 years ago

That sounds like copyright violation. See if you can find a legit free source instead.

onceageek3• 19 years ago

I disagree on copyright part. Two reasons: 1) You are not selling the agreement 2) It is impossible to find out from where or whose agreement (most of them are generic). Moreover, who the heck reads those!!! I am tempted to write in my ToS - that the users hereby agree to sell their soul for using my website :)

I agree on finding a legit free source.

jey2• 19 years ago

> Two reasons: 1) You are not selling the agreement 2) It is impossible to find out from where or whose agreement (most of them are generic). Moreover, who the heck reads those!!!

How does selling it, whether it can be found that you copied it, or whether people read them affect that it's a copyright violation? It's a copyright violation if you publish it as your own, irrespective of whether people read it or find out that you plagiarized it.

pc• 19 years ago

Just steal some free (= Creative Commons licensed) documents:

http://wordpress.com/tos/ http://automattic.com/privacy/

chaostheory• 19 years ago

Here's another alternative: http://www.ownterms.org/

creative commons too

rokhayakebe• 19 years ago

f??k yeah it is.

benhoyt• 19 years ago

It depends on their terms of service.

Seriously, though, we wrote ours ourselves, but we did heavily use info we gleaned from other peoples' ToS. If you're just a generic web 2.0 site you can probably get away with using someone else's generic ToS, but if you're doing anything slightly different, you'll have to tailor it anyway.

FWIW, for microPledge we ended up with http://micropledge.com/conditions -- we got a lawyer friend to look over it briefly, and he gave us a few good pointers.

herdrick• 19 years ago

MySpace did it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775

epi0Bauqu• 19 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112

rami• 19 years ago

If you decide to copy, double check your punctuation. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060806....

cwilbur• 19 years ago

If your lawyer okays it, then it's fine. If you don't have a lawyer, why are you asking us? Ask your lawyer.

Honestly, the questin is like asking "Is it okay to copy code from another project?" And the answer is the same: if it works the way you want it to work, and you won't get in trouble for using it, then go for it. The way to determine if it works the way you want it to work is to consult a lawyer.

Don't think of legalese as if it were just marketing BS; think of it as an odd programming language for the legal system. When you need Python code written or evaluated, you become or hire a Python programmer; when you need legalese written or evalauted, you become or hire a lawyer. It's as simple as that.

Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?

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