You can freely copy pretty much anyone's as legal documents are not covered by copyright.
However, the problem there is that doing so may result you not having the protection you believe that the documents offer you. The false sense of security is now worse than just not having documents as you probably won't do anything to fix it and won't be aware of the risk.
They are for discussion forums, a community CMS service. Broadly they consider a site admin to be the owner of a database/collective work and has database rights, that an individual owns their content but grants a right to the site admin to include that content in the database/collective work into the future. They allow the end user to request deletion of their profile (but acknowledges the data that forms part of the collaborative work will remain). And they dissolve the platform of any liability arising from the content. They place some obligations on the site admin to reactively moderate and handle reported/flagged content within some reasonable (24-48 hours) amount of time, and includes a policy of automatic escalation and content removal (from public view) for flagged content that isn't handled by a site admin. It allows for monetisation via charging for services or referral fees.
> You can freely copy pretty much anyone's as legal documents are not covered by copyright.
Can you really? Any reference?
Personal answer: No, copying TOS for your own website infringes their lawyer's copyright. "Documents written by a lawyer are protected by copyright as much as the work of any other writer"[1]
In the next season: Can we patent a particular way of protecting your website's legal rights ;) ? That would be great fun. We should patent the cease-and-desist letters, unfortunately there is far too much prior art on those...
You can indeed use our documents though and I'll add a licence to the repo to make that clear (after speaking to the lawyers involved first to ensure the licence I choose is the right one).
However, the problem there is that doing so may result you not having the protection you believe that the documents offer you. The false sense of security is now worse than just not having documents as you probably won't do anything to fix it and won't be aware of the risk.
We've put our legal docs online: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal
Copy them if you want.
They are for discussion forums, a community CMS service. Broadly they consider a site admin to be the owner of a database/collective work and has database rights, that an individual owns their content but grants a right to the site admin to include that content in the database/collective work into the future. They allow the end user to request deletion of their profile (but acknowledges the data that forms part of the collaborative work will remain). And they dissolve the platform of any liability arising from the content. They place some obligations on the site admin to reactively moderate and handle reported/flagged content within some reasonable (24-48 hours) amount of time, and includes a policy of automatic escalation and content removal (from public view) for flagged content that isn't handled by a site admin. It allows for monetisation via charging for services or referral fees.