Back when I was still practicing law, I was in-house with a large company. At the time, we were a small GC office - under 10 attorneys - for a really large organization. As a result, nearly all of us were generalists first with a little bit of specialization on the side. Given my background, that meant I did more or less anything tech-related. Anyhow, I now realize most of that buildup is unnecessary, but backspace takes time -
I was reviewing a couple of our web TOS when I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I figured hey, we're not first to market with this thing, lemme go look at what Competitor X wrote. So I do that, and it bears striking similarity to ours. Actually, it's identical except someone CTRL-H'ed the company name. So just for shits, I went and looked at the other two big companies in our market. Identical, other than the company names of course. All of us.
To this day, I have no idea who wrote it first. And I guess since I'm somewhere else doing fintech, I suppose I never will!
Yeah people do it all the time, and I do it all the time. Check out https://github.com/Automattic/legalmattic if you're concerned about copyrights. But really most people don't really care until you become large enough. Just make sure you follow common sense
I was reviewing a couple of our web TOS when I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I figured hey, we're not first to market with this thing, lemme go look at what Competitor X wrote. So I do that, and it bears striking similarity to ours. Actually, it's identical except someone CTRL-H'ed the company name. So just for shits, I went and looked at the other two big companies in our market. Identical, other than the company names of course. All of us.
To this day, I have no idea who wrote it first. And I guess since I'm somewhere else doing fintech, I suppose I never will!