Legal Question in Intellectual Property in New York

Re: disclaimer & terms and agreements

Disclaimers, contracts and other business forms are generally not subject to copyright protection. If there is something within the disclaimer that is distinctly original the owner may have a chance at copyright protection though I am unaware of any such situation. You can check out other websites where you will likely see other language similar or identical to the language you want to copy. It's generaly referred to a "Boiler plate." To have a higher degree of security, you should consult an attorney which should cost you very little.

Re: disclaimer & terms and agreements

In general Steven Mark's comments are accurate.

However to respond further, I HAVE heard of law firms claiming intellectual property rights in their work product in certain circumstances.

It is true that the Berne Convention on Copyright provides that ANY copyrightable expression is protected by copyright even if there is no copyright notice on the work. And even the particular wording of a legal document could be considered to embody copyrightable expression, in most instances.

So a further answer to your question is that you've put your finger on aspect of the law of copyright that might not be most efficient for society. The original author of a particular legal disclaimer probably holds a copyright on the expression it embodies (provided that it was written after the U.S. joined the Berne Convention on Copyright in 1989) and yet if the author were to seek to enforce that exclusive right, it would involve everyone else having to write different wording to seek to achieve essentially the same legal effect.

Something similar to this was litigated in the context of rules for promotional contests sponsored by consumer product companies, and the upshot was that where there are but limited ways to express the same idea, copyright wouldn't be enforced against a competitor who copied another company's "rules."