A Generic Terms of Service for a Website
It seems that almost twice a month now I receive an email regarding a generic terms of service for a website, sometimes also referred to as a model or boilerplate terms and conditions of use. Before I offer you my links to legal sites and samples, please be advised of the following:
- I am not a lawyer
- I have never formally studied law
- I am Not a Lawyer
- Nothing I suggest should be construed as legal advice
- I am NOT a Lawyer
- Consult a qualified and licensed attorney for all issues legal
- I am NOT a Lawyer
- Before addressing me with any claims of liability, please refer to my terms of service
- I AM NOT A LAWYER
Okay, now that we’ve got that legal ugliness out of the way, let’s answer Paul Musgrave’s question as best I can; keeping in mind my limited legal knowledge. Mr. Musgrave writes:
Geek Speak
I believe Paul is referring to a discussion on Josh Claybourn’s website generated by my review of Musgrave’s mother’s campaign website, where as a qualified, trained, certified and experienced computer programmer and website developer I strongly suggested for reasons of usability and accessibility, that the hyperlinks on the Cheryl Musgrave website be rendered soas not to open a new browser window when clicked.
Bravo! Always glad to add another usability convert to our ranks. If you’re comfortable working from the command line in *nix, then you might be able to make site-wide changes in one fell swoop after reading my article “Global replace using find & xarg”
Legalease
As per Paul’s request for drafting a website user agreement, and speaking as a computer programmer and web developer with absolutely no legal training whatsoever, I found it hard to find any cut-n-paste to your website samples. This was in large part because so many sites offer a Terms of Service page that search engine queries were quickly polluted with actual, often copyrighted Terms of Use instead of sample User Agreements that I could modify and use without fear of violating a website’s Terms and Conditions. What I did find were many BBS and newgroups that basically offered one of three opinions:
- Hire an attorney
- Buy a stock agreement either online or from a book of legal boilerplates
- Get permission and copy your web host’s TOS, modifying it to taste
Please note, the above opinions are not my own. They reflect a summation of opinions found a websites such as WebHosting Talk, Webmaster World and news.google.com.
Law-Related Resources:
For those of you who want to pursue this information further, here are some links to law-related websites that might supply you with the information and/or documents you need for your municipality and/or situation. Then again, they might not … I am merely listing them (in no particular order), not necessarily endorsing them.
- Internet Legal Resource Guide
- FindLaw.com
- Ivan Hoffman, B.A., J.D. Attorney at Law
As for an off-the-shelf, boilerplate, sample, model terms of service agreement, I could only find one. Please note it is rendered as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Whether or not it is enforceable is a matter for a trained and licensed attorney, of which I’m not.
- Jurist International : Example of Web Site Terms of Use Agreement
Hope this helps, and sorry for all the disclaimers.
