

Ask HN: is it unethical to copy terms of service? - grandthefttos

Dear HN,<p>I'm currently working on my first startup and we're in the process of getting together terms of service. After looking at competitors in the space, 3 out of the 5 have exactly the same terms of service.<p>Literally the same exact TOS to the word.<p>This raises an interesting ethical dilemma. Is a company's TOS their intellectual property, or would copying TOS be a copyright infringement on the legal entity that authored it to begin with? Are there any legal ramifications other than "hey you, stop copying my stuff"?<p>Any help is appreciated.
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timf
It's not legal. A lot of people use Wordpress and OpenDNS which are made
available under creative commons, see:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385181>

See the comments there about OpenDNS, the privacy policy is also reusable as
long as you edit it the way they want.

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DanBlake
Its very common. Its not legal though. Copying text (or a book) is no
different than copying a image/video.

Maybe they used [http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-
generator....](http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-
generator.htm) ?

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dangrossman
I notice this all the time as well. A few well known, VC funded startups have
Terms of Service documents that are nearly identical to the Google Analytics
TOS.

