Website Use Agreements II

Following on from my post about the website use agreement at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, Rob Hyndman, lawyer and blogger, was kind enough to show me what he uses for his “legals”. I think the contrast is great and Rob’s work should be made more visible. So, with his permission, here’s the Hyndman offering:

Legal Notices

This notice governs your use of my websites and any materials or feeds provided on or by them (the “Sites”). In general, I believe that website terms and conditions are too complicated and are drafted without a common-sense appreciation of the real risks involved. I have tried to keep these terms simple because I believe that people who come to my websites are responsible adults who understand, without being told by me, the nature of the information provided here, and the extent to which they can and can’t rely on it. But having said that, at a minimum I do have to say the following:

• I am not your lawyer and you are not my client merely because you visit or read something on my Sites or send me an e-mail or a fax
• The Sites do not contain legal advice
• I practice law in Ontario, Canada and nowhere else
• I try to ensure that the information on the Sites is timely and accurate, but it might not be. You use the Sites at your own risk and they are provided “as is”
• Any links I provide to third-party material are for convenience only, and do not imply endorsement
• e-mail is not a secure medium for communication. If you want to use a secure medium, contact me and we can discuss the appropriate arrangements

© 2004-2005, Rob Hyndman. All content of my Sites is my property or the property of my suppliers and is protected by copyright, trade-mark and other intellectual property laws and treaty provision laws. No part of this content may be sold or used in any way without my permission, except that any of my articles that I provide or publish on the Sites are licensed under a Creative Commons Canada license.

The copyright notice on Rob’s blog is even looser — “very casual,” as Rob puts it:

All of the swell content here authored by Rob Hyndman is distributed under a Creative Commons license.

The rest … well, for the rest you’re on your own. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Along these lines, it might be interesting to take a look at the Creative Commons license referred to. Rob’s is an “attribution, non-commercial, share-alike” license, to use the CC shorthand. This is explained in a “human-readable” summary on the Creative Commons site in the following way:

You are free:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

• For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
• Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

To make things even simpler, this license is represented by three symbols:

But to make things more…certain, (for what is a lawyer without a superabundance of caution?) these are linked to the “Legal Code (full licence)” which runs a whopping 2600 words. And I should point out, just to complete the circle, that there’s a legal disclaimer on the CC license to exculpate Creative Commons — but I won’t quote it here.