Ask HN: T&C's that don't cause outrage but keep us safe?

2 points

15 years ago

Recently we've all seen the uproar when people have gone to read the T&C's from various web services and found them to leave a feeling of 'theft' or some kind of underhand grab for content rights. Personally I hate these legal agreements, I find I can always read it with a different hat on and see it in a different light, perhaps that's the point.

What is clear however, is that web services and startups clearly need a set of T&C's we can use without fear of alienating our customers, but that also protect us legally from future prosection.

Recently I launched my project CircuitBee (http://www.circuitbee.com) which lets you embed electronic schematics like you would a video with YouTube. I've been working on it part time for over 18 months now and finally we got it released. We slapped the Wordpress CC licensed terms and conditions on it and sent it out the door.

We posted about it on the AdaFruit forums today (http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22089), and our first bit of useful feedback has been about the T&C's. It appears we didn't read them closely enough and included a section that covers the licenses the owner of the content grants us to modify, and redistribute the content for the web service. In short, we fell foul of the same legalese that cause DropBox such backlash recently.

Now DropBox recently posted a modification to their terms making it clearer that they want no part in the ownership of the content. I'd like to do something similar for CircuitBee, but of course legal documents are copyrighted just like any other so I can't wholesale copy the DropBox terms. Leading me to this post.

Does anyone know of any good, legal, and above all readable and acceptable set of terms and conditions that are available under a Creative Commons license or something similar?

If not, perhaps there's a lawyer in the room that might like to start drafting some?