Is it okay to plagiarize another website's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy?

Let's say you find another website with very similar content and operations. Is it okay to copy their Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, tweaking it to fit your needs?

Check out http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/ where you can generate your privacy policy for free and customize it for your needs.

You can use the terms and services from Wordpress, it's GPL. That's what we did :).

I don't think plagiarizing someone else's TOS and privacy policy will lead to too much trouble, because it's probably tough to track down & enforce such a potential violation. I can't speak to the legality of this move either, since I'm not legally trained.

What I would suggest in lieu of copying someone else's TOS and privacy policy is to use a generator like one of these:

• FreePrivacyPolicy.com - They have a long form that will allow you to highly customize a privacy policy to your exact needs. It's pretty neat.
• Privacy Policy/Terms of Service Generator - This generates a very generic privacy policy and TOS. Just enter the name of your company and your US State of business, and you're done.

I like Zippy's answer too ;-)

Assuming you are legally allowed to do so...

I wouldn't recommend it for practicality reasons. If a site describes "gathering email addresses from our superamazingdataminer " and your site has nothing of the sort, it makes no sense.

In short, make sure the policy matches your activity.

We felt that privacy is an important aspect of the brand for a new website we just launched in Beta. We used some of the generators people have mentioned, studied the privacy and terms on other sites, and then worked with a good attorney on the terms and with TRUSTe on the privacy policy. We received excellent support and guidance from the team at TRUSTe on the path to gaining their approval of our privacy policy enabling us to display their seal on our site.

If privacy isn't critical for your brand, then the generators do a good job of covering the basics.

By the way, if you're going to use major ad networks such as Google AdSense, it's typical that they require you to have a privacy policy and a link to it from your home page.