> If you went through the effort to standardize your ToS, it would only be "useful" to a tiny handful of businesses at specific points in their growth trajectory.
Sounds like the kind of language used by people who consider consumer protection to something to work around to maximise profit. Yeah, those businesses can get fucked.
> That being said, as a privacy-respecting entrepreneur, coming up with a "user-respecting" (i.e. win/win, legible, minimally-demanding/withholding) ToS is a sizable challenge. It'd be nice to have templates. I basically resort to reading the ToS of companies I respect in similar verticals.
Its only a sizable challenge if you want to seize more rights for yourself than is already guaranteed by existing laws.
Part of the ToS is explaining exactly what you do as a business with users' data and IP that they submit to your service. If you're maximally ethical, you still have to outline everything, and yes doing this concisely + precisely is a challenge.
Pulling an example out of a hat, see Mullvad's ToS[1] and Privacy Policy[2], and "No Logging" Policy [3].
I wouldn't say (at all) that Mullvad is trying to seize more rights that those guaranteed by existing laws, and yet maintaining their ToS almost certainly costs tens of thousands of dollars per year.
For another example, see Bandcamp's Terms of Use [1]. They straddle the line of social media (where you need the platform to be an effective moderator, which requires extensive ToU) and the music industry (which involves much liability around various IP rights).
Bandcamp isn't really screwing anybody. IMO the most objectionable thing they do is provide Google Analytics as a service to paid musicians. But the lines around that are <5% of their overall set of policies, precious few lines of which are objectionable.
Sounds like the kind of language used by people who consider consumer protection to something to work around to maximise profit. Yeah, those businesses can get fucked.
> That being said, as a privacy-respecting entrepreneur, coming up with a "user-respecting" (i.e. win/win, legible, minimally-demanding/withholding) ToS is a sizable challenge. It'd be nice to have templates. I basically resort to reading the ToS of companies I respect in similar verticals.
Its only a sizable challenge if you want to seize more rights for yourself than is already guaranteed by existing laws.