[esya]

niko001 / Niklaus or whatever. This is extremely shady. You've copy pasted your whole terms and conditions from this page :

https://buffer.com/terms VS: https://gdpr-shield.io/terms - Saved here https://web.archive.org/web/20180504020320/https://gdpr-shie... for good measure

Which is illegal to begin with. You even forgot to replace the part that explains what the service does and left the part that says that gdpr shield "provides a social media management tool".

You're selling something that just basically does a geoip lookup, and then tries to block people from an entire continent, with pure JS, which can be easily avoided, by the way. I'm shooting buffer an email to let them know you're infringing on their legal material.

[detuur]

So you're saying that a service which targets businesses who are trying to avoid a piece of legislation that is shaping up to become a worldwide industry standard turns out to be shady and doesn't respect the law? Well I never.

[nostrademons]

Copying legal documents isn't illegal, and in fact many lawyers will just run a search & replace on an existing client's T&C to generate a new T&C. This is also how T&C generator websites work. It's actually recommended, as then you have standardized language that is all well-defined in the eyes of the courts.

[AliAdams]

You are going to have to do a better job of backing that claim up. It certainly seems to be an obvious breach of intellectual property law at the very least. Citing that some lawyers do this does not automatically make it legal.

[nostrademons]

My initial claim is perhaps a bit too strong. Case law is basically that the unique portions of a T&C or other contract are protected by copyright law, but boilerplate terms that have appeared in lots of different firms' documents are considered public domain.

http://pub.bna.com/ptcj/1051462Jan11.pdf

GDPR-shield's original T&C was actually copied from ShareKit, which is another product from the same company:

https://www.sharekit.io/terms

But going paragraph by paragraph down the terms, you get this list of companies, all with the same language:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Except+for+certain+kinds+...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+must+be+at+least+%5B1...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22To+access+most+features+o...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Service+will+require+...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may+seek+pre-authorizatio...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Service+may+include+a...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may%20suspend%20or%20term...

That's only through section 4, but so far every clause is legal boilerplate except for the first paragraph of section 4, which is unique to ShareKit (and ThreadRadar, another product by the same entrepreneur).