Terms and Conditions are designed to do at least two things: 1) protect you in the reasonable and good-faith pursuit of your business, as defined in those terms and conditions, and 2) inform your client of their rights and responsibilities in interacting with you while pursuing your business. Writing a terms and conditions need not necessarily require a lawyer, however, the more complex your interaction with the customer, and the higher the dependence of the customer on your service or product (including information), the more likely you might want to consider using a lawyer. Questions to ask in the process are:
What does my company DO? Make a list, fairly well broken down, of how your company serves the customer. You should include, in lighter gray text, intangibles such as research and development for better software, and security measures. These are intangibles to the customer but are significant to the customer; putting them in light gray text will allow you to focus on the tangibles first (I sell products, I store information, etc.)
What specific dependence does the customer have on my site? (For example, if I run an ecommerce portal, my customer depends on me to get the product to UPS or the mail and ship it off. For an email service provider like hotmail, the customer expects email to be sent and received.)
What expectations (reasonable and unreasonable) does the customer or user have from my site?
What things can go wrong? Or, in what way could I or my site fail these dependencies or expectations? What effect will this have on both me and my customer, and what actions do I do (am I doing) to protect against these things?
What recourse does the customer (and I) have in the event of these things going wrong?
Writing down the answers to these questions in detail will probably provide all the core material you need to develop your Terms and Conditions.
Terms and Conditions should be written by discrete topic; also the goal for terms and conditions should ALWAYS be readability by the user.
The following are examples of Terms and Conditions used by various sites. If you know of others which we ought to add to this list, please contact us by email with a summary and link to the T&C as shown below.
Site: Istockphoto.com
http://www.istockphoto.com/license.php
Character: serves as a search portal for images, and as a broker between buyers and sellers of those images.
Key Activities: Creators upload and store images and descriptions on the site; Istockphoto.com allows these images to be searchable and dowloadable for a fee; Istockphoto.com takes payment for the images from buyers and disburses payments to Creators; Istockphoto.com provides reporting of activity and sales to Creators.
Dependencies and Expectations (warrantable or otherwise): Buyer depends on downloaded images to open correctly, and may also depend on the image to be "ideal" for their application. Creator depends on site to fairly and correctly present their images to buyers, and to function correctly in selling those images; creator may also expect the site to work at all times or even sell a certain number of images.
Site: Host Gator
http://www.hostgator.com/tos.shtml
Character: web hosting provider, including individual hosting, dedicated servers, and reseller accounts
Key Activities: Host Gator charges customers for web hosting on their servers, both shared accounts and dedicated servers, provides written, online, and over-the-phone technical support, and registers domain names.
Dependencies and Expecations: Customer depends on Host Gator to store their site files and successfully provide access to those site files within a certain response speed. Customer may also expect technical support, not only when applications don't run on the server, but also when their site does not work properly through improper coding or HTML.
Site: Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=508088
Character: well, just about everything nowadays, but primarily a retailer and goods broker
Key Activities: Sell books, electronics and more by mail shipment; also serves as a portal for Sellers to sell books, electronics and more to buyers, and acts as a broker of the deal, receiving a commission in the process. This T&C is fairly extensive but is also readable.
Dependencies and Expectations: Buyers expect items to be as represented. Sellers expect fair representation of their product and to receive payment for their sale.
