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Comment by gokhan | Hacker News Reader

wordpress.com's TOS is "available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use".

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

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Using WordPress.com's TOS is a really bad idea (in my view) if sections 11 and 12 are left in their present form. Those sections could get you into the same type of legal trouble as Blockbuster's TOS got them into in 2009, in the Harris v. Blockbuster case. See http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/using-wordpress-coms-terms-of... for a discussion.

I've mentioned this here before, so I hate to sound like a broken record, but it seems worth repeating.

At a minimum, get your lawyer to review very carefully, and edit, the language of those sections.

They do have a term "If any part of this Agreement is held invalid or unenforceable, that part will be construed to reflect the parties’ original intent, and the remaining portions will remain in full force and effect."

This probably won't be good enough, though, as the "We can do anything we like" term can't be made good.

Perhaps you could add a term "If any part of this Agreement renders the remainder of the Agreement invalid or unenforceable, that part will be considered void, and the remainder of the Agreement valid and enforceable."

But that doesn't explain how you would resolve a part which only conflicts with a few other parts. You could include something about "if any part invalidates or renders unenforceable another part which is written previously on this Agreement, the part which is written later in this Agreement will be considered null and void." That might be dangerous though - a single bad term at the top could nuke the rest of the agreement.

But ... I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. It's not that expensive to get a lawyer to review (and edit) a contract (OK, it's probably as much as a couple of dedicated servers, which might be a lot for a weekend project... but if you have more than one person in the company it's not expensive), and you get the bonus of a contract that actually does what you want it to, not what Wordpress wants. Wordpress probably has different priorities than you.

(Edit to my comment above, two days later:)

I just remembered (smacks forehead with palm) that a couple of years ago I posted a sample privacy policy that can give you and your lawyer a head start---see http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/privacy-policy-for-web-sites-...

I used the Automattic privacy policy as a starting place as well. I'm having my lawyer review my draft version, which will be a lot cheaper than having her write it from scratch.

If you'd like to find other CC licensed privacy policies, you can use this search:

http://search.creativecommons.org/?q=privacy%20policy

That will give you some other candidates.

Ditto.

Used this as well. Just needs a bit of tweaking to fit your need.

http://automattic.com/privacy/

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