OwnTerms

Help with British OwnTerms contracts

We’ve had an email from Rob Cheeseman, who says:

“I’d like to help out with your OwnTerms project.

A little about me: I’m a 3rd year law undergrad in the UK. I have previously worked for the Ministry of Justice, dealing specifically with unfair terms in consumer contracts under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations and the Unfair Contract Terms Act.

Assuming that you have documents that are for use in England and Wales, I will be glad to check for unfair terms in any consumer contracts that you may intend to publish.”

Thanks, Rob! Hopefully we’ll get some donations that’ll need your services soon…

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New Privacy Policy

Thanks to Jordan Hatcher, OwnTerms has gained a second privacy policy; while Jordan is a lawyer, and thus the document has been promoted to the main site swiftly, the policy will always need proofreading and improvements - feel free to chime in on the wiki or mailing list!

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Mailing List and Roadmap

Thanks to suggestions from Jon Phillips, OwnTerms has gained two new features:

• A mailing list! If you’re interested, head over here and subscribe. It should be fairly low-traffic and civil.
• A roadmap for the future - and if you want to help out with anything on there, it’d be fantastic!

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Audio-Visual Recording Release

From a post to the cc-community mailing list, the wiki has gained another draft document - an AV recording release. We could really use a contract lawyer to give the documents on the wiki a proofread; if you can do that, pitch in!

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New Draft Speaker Agreement

The wiki has gained a third document: a draft Speaker Agreement, thanks to Siva Vaidhyanathan (and Gavin Baker, who pointed it out!)

Please head over there and help the checking process, particularly if you’re a content lawyer and can give it a professional proofread.

I’ve also had a private email about whether OwnTerms should use a ported version of the Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 license; if you’ve got a view, comment here.

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How to help out right now

• Help setup the wiki, sign up if you want to, and help start a framework for folks to work in!
• Donate your existing documents and contracts by giving them a Creative Commons license and adding them to the wiki!
• Blog about the project and help get others interested!
• Are you a contract lawyer willing to help out? If so, post a comment or send an email, because we could really use your help - we can’t send documents from the wiki to the main site until they’ve been checked out!

Quick edit: for reasons of security and server load, we’ve moved over to PBWiki - if you see any vandalism, please revert it!

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Launching OwnTerms

Hello. This is OwnTerms, and it’s intended as a clearinghouse for Creative Commons-licensed stock legal documents. Documents like web site terms and conditions, speaker contracts, simple web design contracts and so on.

Why? Because most businesses starting out just rip their terms and conditions from another site; because most freelance designers don’t want the expense of having a contract specially written for them, and wouldn’t know where to start; because Creative Commons-licensed documents can make people’s lives easier.

To start off, we’ve got two documents - the ones that inspired all this - Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy, adapted from the CC-licensed WordPress terms.

OwnTerms is a project started by Tom Scott, with the help of the Creative Commons community.

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