Reusable Example Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Image via CrunchBase

So you’ve decided your new Web site needs a pri­vacy pol­icy or terms of ser­vice. Why? Perhaps you are col­lect­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion, or pro­vid­ing a ser­vice that vis­i­tors may come to depend on. (Or maybe you’re just a lawyer and obses­sively use dis­claimers, waivers, and con­tracts through­out your daily life. If you make your co-rec soc­cer oppo­nents sign waivers before the game starts, I’m talk­ing about you.)

Rather than write such doc­u­ments from scratch, it can help to base it on some­one else’s work. But while you can read most anyone’s poli­cies and terms, tech­ni­cally such doc­u­ments are cov­ered by copy­right pro­tec­tions just like your aver­age Great American Novel (though a good deal less enter­tain­ing, I hope).

One might think that such doc­u­ments are “use­ful arti­cles,” and — like a bicy­cle rack/sculpture that was deemed too use­ful to be cov­ered by a design copy­right — should not be copy­rightable. But, just like soft­ware, they are.

Fortunately, WordPress and par­ent com­pany Automattic, famous providers of blog­ging soft­ware (which I don’t now do use, inci­den­tally), have come to your res­cue. Both their Terms of Use and their Privacy Policy are cov­ered by a Creative Commons “attribution-share alike” license:

• Terms of Use for WordPress.com
• Automattic’s Privacy Policy

This makes them per­fect to reuse and repur­pose (but do not do so with­out seek­ing legal coun­sel as part of the process, since they need to be cus­tomized to your spe­cific needs.) Such a start­ing place can make the whole process eas­ier and more under­stand­able (and there­fore cheaper, since legal coun­sel is quite expen­sive). Kudos to Automattic and WordPress on this.

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