legalLet’s imagine I’m young and ready to start an online business, but I don’t have the resources to pay for a lawyer to create a ToS (terms of service) and Privacy Policy for my business.
Can I go to a future competitor’s website and steal his ToS and Privacy Policy, replacing that entity’s name with my company’s name?
The answer is in the question: you’re “stealing”. Or at least you are from a copyright standpoint - it’s an original work like any other.
You can base your ToS on theirs of course. There’s only so many way to say how you can use services that look like one another. And frankly, let’s get real here: they probably did the same as you’re about to do when they started.
As an aside, don’t miss that a few companies “open source” their ToS. For instance Automattic with wordpress.com:
(Note, we’ve decided to make the below Terms of Service available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use, just make sure to replace references to us with ones to you, and if you don’t mind we’d appreciate a link to WordPress.com somewhere on your site. We spent a lot of money and time on the below, and other people shouldn’t need to do the same.)
https://en.wordpress.com/tos/
You’ll also find plenty of sites with off-the-shelf legal documents that you can base yours on.
Whichever way you go in the end, have a proper lawyer check the docs and edit them if needed. It’s only a small investment compared to having a lawyer write the docs from scratch. Better safe than sorry down the road.
To avoid legal issues down the road, you’d better not to do so. When your startup is still young and doesn’t have budget for asking a lawyer for help, then go for a free template first. Something like this:
https://www.upcounsel.com/privacy-policy-template?utm_source=quora&utm_campaign=atocppeoawccicttetautfmow
You can easily find a lot of online services helping you to generate documents you need for free or at a cheap price. It would be enough at least in the beginning.
No.
It’s their work so they hold copyright in it. That means it’s not legal for you to use it without their permission.
You can’t copy or use copyright material without permission. For example, you can’t buy a painting and then use copies of it for a book cover, or buy a CD and use a track from it in a film.
To use something protected by copyright you must either:
- agree a licence with the owner to use it.
- buy or acquire the copyright.
- confirm that your intended use falls within the exceptions to copyright.
https://www.gov.uk/using-somebody-elses-intellectual-property/copyright
Your best course of action is to find a standard agreement which the copyright holder gives their permission for you to use - there’s a bunch of law firms etc that offer them online. Google will find you some quite quickly.
I’m pretty sure the answer is specific for your legal location. That is the country you’d be sued in. If you are located in country A and steal from competitor in country B, he might sue you in country A, B and/or any other country, in which a court deems itself responsible for his claim. If you and your competitor are servicing customers worldwide via internet, that can be a hell lot of places to be sued in.
While you’re generally cheating whoever wrote the legal text of his payment, legal texts might not be covered by copyright for some countries.
In Germany copyright evolved from protection of “works of art” as well as patenting “technical ideas”.
Legal texts are not works of art, because they lack a creative depth: They’re usually just repeating what the laws allow them to state, e.g. limiting liability that is unlimited by default but can not be disclaimed at whole. Likewise a producer of adult movies tried to sue someone who republished (i.e. stole) explicit scenes from their movies. The claim was rejected by German court, because showing people acting what they’ve literally been doing since the dawn of mankind has no creative depth. The reasoning might’ve been different for a video guide to new techniques loosely based on kamasutra…
While you can get a patent for business models in some countries, I don’t think any legal text is patentable. For one you’d need to register for a patent before any portion of the text has ever been published in effect. Since the ideas have been published as laws you can’t patent your text just for a different wording. And then again there are countries that exempt a lot of things from patenting. Again regional legislation (written laws) and jurisdiction (interpretation of laws) may vary.
The above can be summarized as “in most countries you’re probably safe from being found guilty”. However, that doesn’t say “go ahead”. For a small startup, which even cuts costs by copying legal texts, it’s probably sufficient to be sued in a set of countries to drive your legal costs high enough for you to go bankrupt. You don’t need to be found guilty even in a single case, if your business never saw the end of being sued.
So you should go with one of the free templates suggested in the other answers.
In general, STEALING is never a ‘GOOD’ idea. Now that being said, yes - you are free to do whatever you want; You just have to live with the consequences of it, that’s all. But although it may be tempting to just start copying and pasting from competitors and other websites, especially because when you’re young and starting up a business, you have so many ideas and things to do that it SEEMS like an easier and quicker way to get your website up and running - But its actually counter-productive because search engine, especially Google, check for original content and they can tell which sites reposted or plagiarized the content of another website and they tend to penalize the plagiarizing site in the SERPS. So, if it were me - I wouldn’t do it
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