Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Recommendations | Arizona
Hi, I’m Maria Speth with Jaburg and Wilk. My area of practice is Intellectual Property and Internet Law.
Can a website copy terms of use or a privacy policy from a similar website?
A lot of websites figure they’ll just copy from another website that does a similar type of function or provides a similar service to what they provide. The problem with that is two-fold. Number one, it is actually copyright infringement. It’s not okay to copy somebody else’s terms and conditions and it can be copyright infringement. Number two, it might not really be as suited to your needs as you might think it is. That website might perform a similar function that you perform, but they might not do everything the same way. And you might not want your rules to be exactly like their rules. So I don’t recommend that for both reasons.
What should be included in a website’s terms of use?
In a websites Terms of Use, we want to see things like jurisdiction. If there’s a lawsuit, where will the lawsuit be? You don’t want to get sued in some foreign country or some foreign state. You want to see the rules of what your users can and cannot do on the website. You want to make it really clear to your users whether or not you own what they post on your website or not. You really want to make sure that they understand that they’re responsible for what they do and that you’re not responsible for what they do.