The time has come for you to launch your online business. Your website or app looks great, but you still don’t have one essential component: a terms and conditions agreement.
At this point, you may be tempted to copy and paste someone else’s terms and conditions. Although it’s faster and cheaper to get your legal policies this way than through an attorney, the convenience isn’t worth the risks.
This guide will answer the question “Can I copy terms and conditions?” with three reasons you shouldn’t, and give you tips on how to create your own terms and conditions.
Can I Copy Terms and Conditions?
No, you cannot copy terms and conditions. Copying terms and conditions is illegal, and will ultimately do more harm than good for your business.
Copying terms and conditions is a form of copyright infringement, which is a punishable legal offense. Furthermore, by copying terms and conditions, you run the risk of copying a policy that isn’t properly tailored to your business or website.
Here are the three major reasons you shouldn’t copy someone else’s terms and conditions:
1. You’ll Be Vulnerable to Lawsuits
Terms and conditions form a legal contract between your website or app and its users. To protect your business from legal challenges, your terms and conditions need to be specific to your activities.
If you copy another site’s legal policies, they won’t be tailored to your business, so they’ll likely have gaps in coverage that reduce or eliminate the legal protection terms and conditions should give you.
If legal disputes arise, such as a lawsuit between your site and a user, the terms and conditions you copied won’t make for a strong defense in court.
One copied legal policy could mean thousands of dollars in legal fees and penalties.
2. You Could Be Fined for Copyright Infringement
Copying someone else’s terms and conditions is illegal. Under US copyright laws, terms and conditions are copyright protected.
Your competitors don’t have to look hard to find out that you stole their policies.
In the best-case scenario, you get a cease and desist from your competitor. If your industry is a small one, then word will get around that you’re stealing material from other companies. Your reputation will take a hit, and you will still need to come up with your own policies.
In the worst-case scenario, you end up in court for copyright infringement.
Avoid copyright violations and the massive cost of a court case by writing original terms and conditions.
3. You Will Lose Customers
If users spot issues in your policies, such as references to a completely different company or a lack of site-specific information, you’ll end up losing customers.
While terms and conditions largely serve to protect your business, they also serve to protect your users. They outline the rules for your site, the conditions for using your site, and how users are permitted to interact with one another.
Users expect to have access to the rules of your website, and will quickly discover if these rules are ripped from another site.
Create Your Own Terms And Conditions
Instead of copying terms and conditions, take advantage of our free terms and conditions generator or terms and conditions template to create a custom terms and conditions agreement for your business.
Create Your Terms and Conditions Using Termly
Here’s how you can use Termly’s generator to create comprehensive and customized terms and conditions for your website or app.
Step 1: Go to Termly’s Terms and Conditions Generator.
Step 2: Answer a few simple prompts and questions, and go through all of the steps until you reach “Final Details.”
Step 3: Once you’ve filled in everything and you are satisfied with the preview, click “Publish.” You will then be prompted to create an account on Termly so you can save and edit your terms and conditions further.
While copying someone’s terms and conditions may save you some time and effort now, long-term consequences could be waiting just around the corner.
Create your own terms and conditions for your business so you stay on the right side of the law, and leave your reputation in the clear with customers.
FAQs About Copying Legal Policies
More about the author
Written by Etienne Cussol CIPP/E, CIPM
Etienne is an Information Privacy professional and compliance analyst for Termly. He has been with us since 2021, managing our own compliance with data protection laws and participating in our marketing researches. His fields of expertise - and interest - include data protection (GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, CCPA), tracking technologies (third-party cookies, fingerprinting), and new forms of privacy management (GPC and the Google Privacy Sandbox). Etienne studied International Economic Affairs at the University of Toulouse, and graduated with a Masters in 2017. More about the author
reviewed by Masha Komnenic CIPP/E, CIPM, CIPT, FIP Director of Global Privacy
