Ask HN: What's the Best DMCA, Privacy Policy, and ToS Boilerplate Out There? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the Best DMCA, Privacy Policy, and ToS Boilerplate Out There?

7 pointsrpm43214 comments

Hi HN, I'm just getting ready to launch a big side project that I've been working on for quite a while, and I'm realizing that I need to have a DMCA notice, as well as Privacy Policy and Terms of Use statements.

I'm obviously going to hold off on legal consultation until I get some traction, so I'm wondering what the best reusable DMCA boilerplate is?

Regarding Privacy and Terms of Service, I believe Automattic has open sourced theirs, correct? Any better options out there?

Thanks in advance.

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I found HN's approach to be interesting. (I looked when I noticed the new link in the footer.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html

I can't speak to how "good" or "correct" it is. OTOH, pg usually seems to put some good thought into such things.

What are you referring to when you say DMCA boilerplate? You don't dictate anything about that, the process is defined by statute. Copyright holders send infringement notices to your DMCA agent listed at the copyright office, you disable access to the content in those notices in a reasonable time, you gain the safe harbor liability protections.

Hi Dan, I'm aware of how DMCA works, but from what I've seen there's a fair amount of variation between how the DMCA Notice pages are written.

Examples:

http://secondlife.com/corporate/dmca.php

https://www.dropbox.com/dmca

EDIT:

In case anyone's interested, here's the relevant info and forms from the US Copyright Office:

http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/

as well as a few other resources:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/dmca-righthaven-loo...

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/

"DMCA notice pages" are something these businesses made up for their own convenience, to better funnel the notices to the right people and make sure they're in the right format so they can deal with them faster. You don't have to make such a page -- most businesses don't. You don't lose anything; the act is in force whether you copy its terms onto a page of your website or not. Until you have millions of customers, "too many companies are sending notices to our sales and support mailboxes instead of our DMCA agent" probably isn't a problem you have to address.

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