Ask HN: As a startup, how do you create a Terms of Use and a Privacy Policy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As a startup, how do you create a Terms of Use and a Privacy Policy?

17 pointsopdahl8 comments

Copy (and edit) one from a competitor until you can afford to pay for your own

Will that violate copyright (or whatever the IP rights law for this is called)?

Possibly? IANAL, but you probably aren't going to be a target until you are big enough to afford to have these done properly. Worst case they ask you to take it down, unlikely the company could demonstrate a loss, maybe the lawyers?

That being said, much of the language is pretty common across TOS and such, especially when you narrow to a particular niche

Also know that the lawyers aren't writing these from scratch every time, they have templates they share within their firm so many companies are getting standard boilerplate anyhow

This was my best attempt at a minimalist one: https://random-character.com/privacy

I don't know how legally binding this is or if it covers me sufficiently. Maybe someone can comment on it.

Pay an attorney experienced in such matters.

If the startup cannot afford to pay an attorney, the startup is under-capitalized.

Under-capitalization is a reason to question the startup's viability and by extension the urgency of legal documents that are designed to protect ongoing businesses.

Or to put it another way, if the startup can't pay for an attorney, terms of use and privacy policies are not urgent and are of only slight importance. Because they only help when a lawyer is arguing in court.

The simplest privacy policy that might work is not collecting private information. The simplest terms of use is make something that provides a clear exchange of value such as money for services.

Good luck.

We recently started publishing our legal stuff for Seam: https://getseam.com/legal

The TL;DR, I had an excellent attorney friend (who, cherry on the quake, has a CS degree and understands APIs very well) write all of it for us. All in all, it was sub $5K and I had some very specific wording/requirements around privacy which took a lot of work. I think a regular law-firm would have charged 10X this, maybe more.

If your product is simple (Saas), a cheap attorney should be able to loosely model something that works based on other example companies out there. Maybe have a more experience counsel also take a second look ("second opinion").

Most startups I have been with have copied one from a company that could trivially afford lawyers and dropped it in.

I use [1] and [2] generators, and then I review the generated document. I plan to review it with an attorney once it becomes really needed.

  [1] - https://www.termsofservicegenerator.net/
  [2] - https://www.gdprprivacynotice.com/

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