Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Terms of Use

That would be neither legal nor wise. The TOS is copyrighted by virtue of its being in tangible form, and you could be sued for copyright infringement.

The more important question is whether someone else's TOS would be useful to you. Your web site needs a TOS that is specific to it. If you have message boards, you need to have a TOS that protects you. If you steal a TOS from a web site that does not have message boards, then you will not be protected.

Re: Terms of Use

Many legal forms are copyrighted. Look for the words "copyright" and/or the circle-c copyright symbol. If present, you clerly can't copy the text verbatim or nearly so without violating copyright law. If there is no evidence of a formal copyright, the original author of the wording has or may have some legal rights under traditional, common-law copyright principles, but would be less likely to sue and would have more difficulty in doing so. Especially if the wording used basically follows a widely-used pattern and contains little or no creativity or legal research, its not much of a worry.