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Is there a good resource for templates for those documents?

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I don't know if terms and conditions can be copyrighted, but I have previously gone to competitors and just copied their T&C's / privacy policy and tweaked as appropriate.

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Safer to look at a few competitors and pick and choose paragraphs and paraphrase, but good advice. – user6603 Apr 28 '11 at 20:48
Yeah I mean I definitely modified them to fit my business but in general I figured, let them pay for the lawyer, haha. – Nick Apr 29 '11 at 16:49
Legal documents can be subject to copyright. The exact criteria for when they're copyright-able are not simple, but see: answers.onstartups.com/questions/8098/… There are openly licensed documents available to work from, using these would be good style, and avoids any potential copyright infringement issues, see fx answers.onstartups.com/questions/5854/… – Jesper Mortensen♦ May 6 '11 at 20:27
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I based mine on these: UK BusinessLink Sample Policies, they're UK based though you'd have to remove references to UK Data Protection Act etc, but clear, and pleasingly free of dense legalese.

I've also come across a couple of privacy policy generators, but can't really comment on their output as we went with the above.

Picking specific bits from competitors can be helpful too.

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Sadly that link doesn't seem to have survived the GOV.UK "upgrade". – Steve Jones Oct 19 '12 at 8:16
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From what I have seen, online privacy policy generators (do a Google search) can be very helpful, because they ask the right questions, and an entrepreneur can readily come up with appropriate answers.

Terms of use, on the other hand, should be much more company-specific. It is difficult for a non-lawyer to know (a) whether another company's terms are good and (b) whether there are important issues that are not addressed (appropriately) by the other company's terms.

Disclaimer: This information does not constitute legal advice and does not establish an attorney-client relationship.

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Using a generator or looking to your competitors is a great way to introduce yourself to the kinds of things that should be included in these documents, but I think it's worthwhile to spend time crafting your own version for a couple of reasons:

  1. Although most users will not read these documents, if they want to blame you for something they will. For example, if your application has a bug in it that causes them to lose data they may try to hold you financially responsible. Make sure you like the way your Terms and Conditions deals with these situations.
  2. These are a great marketing opportunity. You will probably have a few users read these documents, and they'll be expecting the dry legalese that everyone else has. Surprise them and reaffirm your brand by crafting them with care.

For my start-up I began with a generator like the ones other people have mentioned, and then I rewrote/removed/added sections until I liked the end result. Feel free to take a look at what I came up with:

Red Monocle's Privacy Policy

Red Monocle's Terms of Service

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