

Ask HN: Plain English ToS - Is This Legal? - andrewljohnson

Dear HN,<p>My website is now getting enough traffic that my lawyer encouraged me to draft Terms of Service. I'm loathe to make one of those legalese laden nonsense pages, so I tried to point out the dangers and restrictions of using TrailBehind.com in plain English.<p>Does this document provide me any legal cover from the types of dangers it intends to protect against? Like a guy getting lost because my map data was wrong?<p>http://www.andrewljohnson.com/article/Plain%20English%20Terms%20of%20Service
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ErrantX
No. You should never write your own license - the same applies here. You will
get it wrong (simply by not being a lawyer :)) and it wont cover what it is
supposed to.

Get a proper ToS drafted and then do what Creative Commons does with their
licenses: do a page with just a few lines detailing in plain terms what it
means (REALLY simple, what you wrote is far too complicated - the main off put
for a ToS document is the wall of text) with a link to the actual legal
document.

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huhtenberg
The target audience of T&C legalese is not your users, it's their lawyers if
it ever comes to that. Create proper, lawyer-friendly version and _then_ make
a non-binding user-friendly summary in plain English if you feel like it.

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michael_dorfman
If you have a lawyer, why are you asking for legal advice from a bunch of
amateurs?

Discuss your concerns with your lawyer, and pay him to draft a TOS document.
Ask him to use the reader-friendliest language that protects your interests.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I sent these to my lawyer for review as well.

Unfortunately, his advice costs hundreds of dollars an hour, and yours is
free.

~~~
michael_dorfman
...and in each case, you get what you pay for.

Listen, I speak from experience: a few thousand bucks in legal fees could have
literally saved me millions. Don't skimp where the legal profession is
concerned.

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eds
Haha. I like it. Looks good to me, though I'm not a lawyer. Only thing I could
think of adding would be a sentence that explicitly says something like "you
assume all responsibility for your use of the site and any information you get
from it."

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RiderOfGiraffes
Direct link to save time:
[http://www.andrewljohnson.com/article/Plain%20English%20Term...](http://www.andrewljohnson.com/article/Plain%20English%20Terms%20of%20Service)

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noodle
i think you could summarize it better. maybe... "disclaimer: never use
trailbehind for any reason"

