Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions and Agreements

I agree with Ms. Cowin. The main issue here is the suitability of the plagiarized document for your needs. A side issue is copyright infringement. Suits for infringement depend on (1) the plaintiff was the true creator or has acquired the copyright, and (2) damages. The person you're proposing to copy from may or may not be able to claim both in a lawsuit - probably not.

Re: Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions and Agreements

It's often said that lawyers are the greatest plagiarists of all and so there are great commonalities between many contracts. If the agreement is notated as copyrighted or done by a large law firm there may be greater risk of a copyright issue, but generally a contract consists of a great deal of standard language. The much, much greater danger is that you don't know what to include, what to omit, what wasn't even in that sample contract and what it all means. Just because a layperson thinks that two deals or two websites seem similar does not necessarily mean that a lawyer would come to the same conclusion. As a total guess, I would say you're probably looking at upwards of a thousand dollars to have a lawyer do the work, but that just depends on how many hours are legitimately involved. That would include having an initial meeting, learning about your business, creating a customized legal document(s) and reviewing it with you. I once saved a company $20,000 in a single week by knowing what to revise on the "standard" contract they were going to just doctor up themselves. Like the diet ads would say, your results may not be as spectacular, but that does drive home the point.

Re: Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions and Agreements

With legal services, you often get what you pay for. If you take someone else's bad agreement, then that's what you have. if you are serious about accomplishing something, let me know.

Best,

Daniel

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