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Ask HN: Borrowing TOC from a similiar service?
11 points by lumberjack on Aug 1, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
Is this legal/wise as a temporary solution?

I've read through it and amended it as required. It's fairly generic in itself.



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!


If you have to ask "is this legal?" you should find someone who is able to answer questions like that, to wit, a lawyer.


I just used https://termsfeed.com/ as suggested by someone. The cost was like $40 and I saved myself any potential headache.

You just check off the boxes of what you need and fill in a few fields and you get a nice somewhat customized TOC for your site.


I've used Wordpress'/Automattic's that are CC licensed

Privacy Policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/ TOS: https://en.wordpress.com/tos/

I had to modify them slightly for my use case but was pretty easy


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




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