Terms of Use Help

[Manifesto55]

Just wondering how beyond.ca came up with its terms of use policy. It seems pretty brief. Did you get a lawyer to check that you were covered for liability, defamation, copywrite infringement if people were posting that kind of thing? If you did, who did you use and do you know about how much it should cost to get a document like that reviewed by a legal professional?

[rage2]

You can spend $100k on an iron clad terms of use policy, if someone wants to sue you, you're gonna get sued. People have tried to sue us, even though it's baseless, costs money to hire lawyers to defend us, even if it's to get the case thrown out. To date, nobody has won against us. During the Telus strike, the TWU threatened to sue us because there was what they felt was slanderous comments left by members of this site. We hired a lawyer to tell them to fuck off, and never heard from them again.

There are rules when it comes to public forums. The poster is pretty much the guilty party, and the operators of the site does not have any responsibility for PUBLIC postings. Often, lawsuits ignore those rules and uses lawyers and frivilous lawsuits to force you to do what they want. Lucky for us, we have money here to defend ourselves against stupid stuff like that. Unless it was Microsoft of course... which is why we won't allow modchip sales on the site. Pick the right battles.

Our TOS is the generic TOS provided by vbulletin. Like I said, there's no point in doing a TOS to cover all bases. You'll get sued just because someone thinks they have the power to influence how you run your site by bullying you. And if you're looking at doing anything illegal on a site, TOS won't save your ass. For example, if we post "all sales in the marketplace is the responsibility of the seller and buyer", yet the site caters to marijuana sales, you're gonna get busted.

Over the years, we've been legally threatened or sued about 10 times now, ranging from TWU to vendors that someone wasn't happy about. Each one stemmed from someone being unhappy about a post, wanted us to delete it, we refused, etc. In 1 case, the police were involved, and we gave up the information of the poster to them. We have yet to delete a post because someone threatened us if we didn't.

If you're running a large forum, be prepared to fight off crap like this. Make friends with lawyers. Otherwise, you'll get pushed around to do things you don't want to do. ie delete a negative review of a company that's totally legit, and your userbase will backlash against actions like that.