Ask HN: Terms, conditions, privacy policy… or not? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Terms, conditions, privacy policy… or not?

2 pointslilcarlyung3 comments

I am about to launch my first serious side project, an online user-created content distribution platform.

I have noticed that pretty much any serious online service always has terms, conditions, and privacy policy written down somewhere on their site. How does one go about writing these in practice?

I’ve thought about writing my terms based on ones from other sites, or maybe using a terms and conditions generator, but in both these cases I risk of not truly understanding the legal implications of what I am actually telling my potential users. Obviously, hiring a lawyer of some sort to review the conditions would make sense.

What would the legal implications, in general, be if I did not provide any such conditions at all on my site?

I am based in the EU but the site will be running on US servers, if that makes any difference.

[IANAL]

Distributing content created by other people has significant copyright implications. Sites with uploaded content have tended to draw enforcement actions because they often attract users interested in copyright infringing activities. Compound that by a large factor for international transactions.

Talk to a lawyer.

While legal documents like terms and conditions can have surprising gotchas, they are not impossible to decipher for a layman and for a completely new website, it is absolutely reasonable and practical to spend an afternoon researching the gist of concepts and getting a sufficient understanding so you can create a T&C that won't cause you legal troubles.

That is, if you want to create a T&C in the first place. Hacker News doesn't have a T&C. Facebook certainly didn't have a T&C when it first launched, and Apple didn't sell their Apple I with a contract. You are very very unlikely to encounter any issues without a T&C and privacy policy.

Do you sell things, or is this a free service?

For many simple cases, there are templates out there - it might still be worth it to invest in some lawyer time to check if the match your service.

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