Terms of service: Who should accept them?
We have an online service for creating and sharing work instructions. After a private demo of the software, companies usually go for a free 30-day trial. In our software, we define an administrator account (for the person who requested the trial) when we set up the customer's environment and let him create all other necessary user accounts.
My question concerns the Terms of Service and who should accept them: should it be the administrator only (in the name of the entire company) or should each new user added by the administrator also have to accept them when they login for the first time?
Thanks
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It probably depends on the wording of your terms. – Steve Jones 11 years ago
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In fact I'm reworking the ToS in a way that applies to all users. But I'm unsure if the ToS should only be accepted by the person that initially subscribed to the service or by all users (i.e. those added by the subscriber)? – Daniel Frechette 11 years ago
1 Answer
The best for you should be the ToS "accepted" by the company --> let the company to take care of the respect of these rules by it's employees.
It will be easier for you from several points of view:
- it's better to be in contact with one responsible than with 50, 100, ... users individually
- the company is always more eager to respect rules and contracts than the individuals (company has more responsibility)
- if you go for the "user responsibility" imagine this case: one of the users abuses your ToS. Will you suit him personally? Or as an employee of the client? And what if he is not employee anymore?
So indeed it depends on the wording of your ToS but in most cases, it would be in your favor to have the client company (as legal entity) be globally responsible for the respect of your ToS.
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Good points. This would entail that the ToS get approved and signed by an officer of the company before they start using the service. Not knowing if the person that subscribed to the service has the authority to sign in the name of the company, I would display a form that must be completed by someone who does. The form would end with an "I have read and accept the ToS" checkbox. Would this be sufficient? – Daniel Frechette 11 years ago
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I forgot to indicate in my reply above that this form would be displayed immediately after the subscriber accesses the service for the first time. – Daniel Frechette 11 years ago
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concerning the form: that should be sufficient (that's the common way of doing) but what counts the most is the ToS content. In the ToS, you should specify something like: *"The company represented by the Subscriber will insure that all it's employees using the Service will read and respect these Conditions."* and *"The Company agrees that in case of misuse of the Service by Company's employee, it is the Company that will be held for responsible and the legal actions will be taken towards the Company."* -> **this is just an example of how it could look like. I am not a lawyer.** – Data Smarter 11 years ago
