
What is the minimum business stuff like acceptable use policies etc. that I will need to launch a product? - dawie

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pg
IANL, but I'll take a risk here and say you don't need anything at all. I
don't think reddit had any legal boilerplate when they launched, for example.

No one cares about this kind of stuff till you're big. So get big and then
worry about it.

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Readmore
I suppose it depends on your product really, if you're storing credit card
numbers you'll need to think about what you are responsible for legally, which
can change from state to state. That being said, if you're doing some kind of
social app I wouldn't be too worried about the legal stuff. I would write up
something that tells the user you're going to do your best to keep their data
safe and available but you can't promise 99.9% uptime or anything. I think a
well written paragraph telling the users what they should expect, and what
they will have to agree to, will go alot further then pages of legalise.

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dawie
Its a pretty simple site thats not even going to ask for payments right away.
We will implement that in 30 days time...

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brlewis
When you accept money you're establishing a contract, so you'll want to limit
liability to just getting their money back. You'll want to establish what
courts might be used for dispute resolution. You'll need to be explicit about
any behaviors that would result in you terminating their service without
refunding their money.

Your users agree to certain obligations as part of the contract; you should
too. Make privacy a contractual obligation on your part, not just a policy.

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jcwentz
Sounds like a bad plan to make privacy a contractual obligation, because then
you're undertaking a legal obligation not to have your server hacked. No one
who understands servers would do that.

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brlewis
ourdoings.com "Agrees not to use or disclose your personal information, or the
personal information of others who use your site, without permission for any
purpose other than providing and improving this service, except as required by
law."

If someone breaks into the datacenter and physically steals the server (a more
realistic scenario than the server being hacked) I don't think that would
count as "disclosing". But I'm in Massachusetts where courts seem to have a
higher-than-average degree of common sense.

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herdrick
MySpace just went copy-and-paste:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3775>

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staunch
This is the kind of thing that you should probably not spend any time on. Risk
is the name of the game and this is one of the smallest.

It might even be riskier post copy/paste legal documents. Because you're not a
lawyer you don't know what ramifications it could have on any future
litigation.

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aran
In Canada at least, legal notices are not themselves protected. The same is
probably true in the US. You can copy them, but obviously someone else's
policy might not be what you want.

(IANAL, I could be wrong and often am, this is not legal advice, etc. etc.)

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dawie
So I am about to launch a product that I have been working on for some time
now. The question I have is does anyone know what legal stuff and exceptable
use policies I need and where I could get some. I don't have cash to get a
lawyer to do this.

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danielha
A terms of use and a privacy clause should be sufficient.

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dawie
Any idea where I can get these? Free ones that is.

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ph0rque
Our start-up (i-conserve.com) looked around on the web, saw that most were
partial copies of each other (as in, whole paragraphs verbatim), and decided
to write our own, based on 4 or 5 we liked. We really liked the bare-bones
approach most YC companies have, and tried to follow that philosophy when
writing such legal documents.

Then we talked about to a local long-time entrepreneur, who said that is
exactly what his lawyer did, and charged him thousands for it; in fact, it
didn't turn out that great. So, save some money and write them yourself.

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drop19
This seems like too big of a distraction; file it away on your to do list
until it matters.

