by Traverse Legal, reviewed by Enrico Schaefer - September 9, 2011 - i. Terms of Service Agreement Forms
Your terms of service are your business model:
Too many lawyers try and draft terms of service (TOS) or terms of use (TOU) to protect the website operator to the extremes. Drafting contract terms which overly-protect the website owner can have consequences, however. Especially on issues related to privacy policies, consumers are becoming more aware of the clickwrap agreements they agree to. Perhaps the constant privacy concerns within the Facebook community are driving more consumer awareness about these issues.
Dropbox is a web-based file hosting service that uses cloud computing which lets users share their photos, documents, and videos with others across the internet using file synchronization. Recently, Dropbox suffered a security and privacy breach which caused its consumers to focus on the Dropbox terms of service. In order to recover consumer confidence, Dropbox has modified its terms of service to placate the privacy concerns of its members. I love the plain language they use to describe their business model when it comes to intellectual property, trademarks, copyrights and the rest:
You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.
We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction. This includes product features visible to you, for example, image thumbnails or document previews. It also includes design choices we make to technically administer our Services, for example, how we redundantly backup data to keep it safe. You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services. This permission also extends to trusted third parties we work with to provide the Services, for example Amazon, which provides our storage space (again, only to provide the Services).
This recent change to Dropbox TOS is examined in this ZDNet article.
As a founding partner of Traverse Legal, PLC, he has more than thirty years of experience as an attorney for both established companies and emerging start-ups. His extensive experience includes navigating technology law matters and complex litigation throughout the United States.
This page has been written, edited, and reviewed by a team of legal writers following our comprehensive editorial guidelines. This page was approved by attorney Enrico Schaefer, who has more than 20 years of legal experience as a practicing Business, IP, and Technology Law litigation attorney.
