Ask HN: How do I write a legal disclaimer for my startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I write a legal disclaimer for my startup?

25 pointschunkyslink14 comments

I've been building a web based app with a friend for about 3 months as a side project. We hope to go live in about another month or so.

One of the things we don't have sorted out is the 'legal disclaimer' text that you see on all websites.

Without giving too much away (!) our application allows the easy management of recipes / shopping lists. We do not sell anything but provide a tool that users can use as is.

We are not charging for the use of this tool (we may go down the freemium route later if we add new features).

What is the best way to go about sorting out this part of the site? We are based in the UK.

edit: My other question is which I forgot to ask is 'is it even worth having one?'

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I have a legal disclaimer. It is the least visited page on my site. Feel free to steal it and rewrite to make your own.

This strikes me as one of those stupid box-checking steps that serves no good at all. Your defense against litigation is not that you mumble magic words which have paranormal power to scare away the solicitors. Your defense against litigation is that nobody will sue you because your site tracks recipes. If for some reason someone should get very POed at you, you will send them a conciliatory email and refund all the money they paid, and that will be the end of it.

What if there's a recipe that includes poison as an ingredient?

Or, more realistically, recipes that cause food allergies or something along those lines. I don't think it's at all likely he'll get sued, but I do think his product is riskier in this regard than say bingo cards simply because it deals with things people will be putting into their bodies.

Exactly. And as the site will be contain user generated content, which will be impossible to police 100%. Someone could potentially put something damaging on there. Then if a child / minor uses the site and becomes ill as a result of copying something they have learned from the site - this might leave us open to a law suit.

When you go into a bookstore, do you routinely get clerks saying "Thanks for coming to our humble establishment. Prior to being allowed to actually see the books, we'll need you to sign this waiver of liability, which disclaims any responsibility on our part if you should open one of the cookbooks and cook Thai food while having a lethal allergy to peanuts."

This has not been my experience in bookstores. If you're totally unable to sleep at night because you live in fear that vampires might descend on you if you do not say the right words and make three circles clockwise prior to opening for business, then say the right words and make three circles clockwise. Otherwise, go solve a problem for people.

I don't think I was suggesting that he should require his users to sign a waiver of liability or anything like that. All I said was that something involving food should take this type of thing a bit more seriously than something that doesn't involve food. I'd imagine that the cookbooks themselves contain some type of disclaimer of this sort to help protect the authors and publishers. His site is basically a publisher where some of the authors are probably anonymous.

And I don't know where your second paragraph came from. Why does considering these things mean I'm unable to sleep at night? At some point, you made the decision to include a terms of service for your site. All I did was try to point out a couple things he should consider for his TOS that wouldn't be relevant for most sites.

He's being facetious.

Wordpress.com have a pretty good Terms of Use policy which they've licensed under a Creative Commons share-alike license. I personally think this is the best starting point :)

http://en.wordpress.com/tos/

My Google skills are failing me today, as I'm convinced that I've used a privacy policy and T&Cs generator from a UK government website before.

Ah! Here we go:

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?type=RESO...

Lots of link action for creating relevant policies :)

If you feel it's worth having one, it's worth getting a lawyer to handle. Having one that's not written properly could very well cause more problems than not having one at all.

Can recipes be copyrighted? I'm assuming they can be, so that might be a concern if you are 'sharing' recipes with other users or to the public and someone uploads everything from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Yea, this is the type of thing I'm worried about and my knowledge of law is basically nothing.

I would hope for some type of letter asking me to remove content before anything serious happened.

<joke unrelated to actual discussion> Did your idea just get documented on xkcd? ;) http://xkcd.com/720/

Legal River Terms of Service Generator - http://bit.ly/aJd1F6

No URL shorteners please! http://terms-of-service-generator.legalriver.com/

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