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Plagiarized Privacy Policy

by Ducksauce
21 replies
I have not built many sites, the IM ones I have "learnt on" and built I just put a simple about 15 lines Privacy Policy I simply copied of another site and changed it around.

I am building a site for a real bricks and mortar company, and looking at their opposition, it looks like a lawyer as written out these very long winded policies, I wont use the oppositions, but is it kind of OK to just lift a Privacy policy, and change it around a bit. In fact, most policies have almost the same thing.

Google hates Plagiarized stuff, I am very proud of having original work, just the Privacy Policy has me kind of stumped. Does Google give penalties for this on this page? I have noticed most IM sites have almost the same Policy. Many have a software generated PP which is identical except for the web site name.
Thanks for reading
#plagiarized #policy #privacy
  • Profile picture of the author Matt Ausin
    Google doesn't give penalties to your site for a duplicated privacy policy.

    I'd say there is a very good number of sites that just use the Easy Privacy Policy plugin so their privacy policies are exactly the same, and that doesn't stop those sites from ranking..
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  • Profile picture of the author Underground SEO
    I would be highly surprised if Google gave a penalty for a duplicated privacy policy, they are so common in their wording that it would make no sense to
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  • Profile picture of the author Ducksauce
    Thank you for your advice on this subject
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    • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
      Legal documents on websites, including privacy policies, can be protected by copyright.

      So, I'd be more concerned about potential copyright infringement than any supposed "duplicate content penalty" from Google.

      So, it's not a good idea to "lift" someone else's privacy policy or portions thereof. On top of that, a privacy policy is something the site owners have to adhere to, so you need to make sure it is something they will be familiar with and follow, and also that it appropriately covers and details how personal information will be used by the site.
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  • Profile picture of the author travlinguy
    So the question here is this: Is it okay to steal as long as Google doesn't mind? Wonderful.
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    • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
      Originally Posted by travlinguy View Post

      So the question here is this: Is it okay to steal as long as Google doesn't mind? Wonderful.
      In this case, I think that a lot of people assume legal documents aren't protected by copyright, because so many privacy policies, terms of use and so on are almost identical.

      And, by "identical", I'm not meaning the sites that have copied each other. I'm referring to the fact that just about every major site you join, each of which has their own lawyers drafting their documents, has, to the layman, what appears to be largely the same clauses and so forth in their user agreements.

      You know, the ones most people skim and never read until they get banned.

      I think because, to most people, these agreements and policies and such seem like a bunch of mindless legalese, so that it doesn't occur to them that they merit copyright protection.

      But, they do. And they are protected. And, while I believe it is rare, some will sue over pilfered documents like that.

      At any rate, copyright-protected or not, it is still a good idea to have such agreements and policies drawn up such that they are personalized to the site and are tailored to that site's uniquities.
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      • Profile picture of the author travlinguy
        Originally Posted by Dan C. Rinnert View Post

        In this case, I think that a lot of people assume legal documents aren't protected by copyright, because so many privacy policies, terms of use and so on are almost identical.

        And, by "identical", I'm not meaning the sites that have copied each other. I'm referring to the fact that just about every major site you join, each of which has their own lawyers drafting their documents, has, to the layman, what appears to be largely the same clauses and so forth in their user agreements.

        You know, the ones most people skim and never read until they get banned.

        I think because, to most people, these agreements and policies and such seem like a bunch of mindless legalese, so that it doesn't occur to them that they merit copyright protection.

        But, they do. And they are protected. And, while I believe it is rare, some will sue over pilfered documents like that.

        At any rate, copyright-protected or not, it is still a good idea to have such agreements and policies drawn up such that they are personalized to the site and are tailored to that site's uniquities.
        Hi Dan...

        I understand. This guy knew what he was doing when he used the word plagiarized.

        It's just disturbing to see so many of these types of questions these days. People asking this stuff are the first to come whining about the injustice when they run into a serial refunder or find their ebooks or whatever have been pirated.

        This is really pretty simple. If you didn't create it or have a license to use it, it's theft. There are a few provisions for "limited use" when it comes to using copyrighted stuff in a review or whatever but that’s it. Limited.

        This particular issue pisses me off. Occasionally, when I feel especially masochistic I'll take something I've written and run it through copyscape. My stomach does backflips when I find people have "lifted" my stuff and decided to call it theirs.

        The last time I did this I found a prominent stage hypnotist had plagiarized a ton of my material and was using it to promote his act. He was smart enough to take it down really quick.

        There's not enough time in the day to actually do good work and deal with all the parasites too. Just a mini rant here.
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        • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
          Originally Posted by travlinguy View Post

          I understand. This guy knew what he was doing when he used the word plagiarized.

          It's just disturbing to see so many of these types of questions these days. People asking this stuff are the first to come whining about the injustice when they run into a serial refunder or find their ebooks or whatever have been pirated.
          True, but the OP also said "I am very proud of having original work." It seemed to me that it was only the Privacy Policy he was asking about "lifting." There are areas of copyright that are frequently misunderstood by people, and I think legal documents are one of them. Since so many say the same thing, it's understandable (I think) that some people just assume it's generic stuff.

          I think we often think of copyright in terms of creative works (articles, pictures, stories, etc.) and the thought of a legal document being "creative" is a bit counterintuitive. (Although, I must admit, some of the clauses my lawyer wrote seem creative.)

          Anyway, I don't like content thieves either. It can be a pain to track them down and get sites taken down and such. My biggest problem has been bandwidth thieves. One month, I had a particularly large graphic on one of my sites get several hundred thousand hits because of hotlinkers (some Facebook app or something). Those sorts of thieves cost you time and money, and they don't think anything of it because they think everything is free on the Internet.
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          • Profile picture of the author travlinguy
            Originally Posted by Dan C. Rinnert View Post

            My biggest problem has been bandwidth thieves. One month, I had a particularly large graphic on one of my sites get several hundred thousand hits because of hotlinkers (some Facebook app or something).
            Yep. Been there too. Last month I was checking site stats and found a bunch of hits from CraigsList. It was some car dealer hotlinking to a red arrow I used to point to one of my offers. So I renamed a very "off color" image with the name of the arrow graphic and uploaded it.

            I would have loved to seen his face on this dealer when he found out that 11 of his CL ads now had a picture of a guy pointing to his bare butt with lipstick standing over "the deal of the week." You know, kiss my assets. Suprising how quick he took that down. I never had to say a word to him.
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            • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
              Originally Posted by travlinguy View Post

              I would have loved to seen his face on this dealer when he found out that 11 of his CL ads now had a picture of a guy pointing to his bear butt with lipstick standing over "the deal of the week." You know, kiss my assets. Suprising how quick he took that down. I never had to say a word to him.
              I found a hotlinker once that had used on of my images on his blog. He had failed to use height and width parameters in the IMG tag. So, I replaced the image with a full page ad for my website. He took that image off his site the same day.

              Back when most people still had dial-up, my webhost recommended swapping out hotlinked images with an image 1 MB in size. It would then take forever for a hotlinker's website to load.

              That tactic still can work on forums. Someone hotlinks an image to use as their avatar? Well, make that image huge and the forum will scroll to a crawl. Usually, it'll be the forum host that scrubs the image for you.
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            • Profile picture of the author Will Edwards
              Originally Posted by travlinguy View Post

              Yep. Been there too. Last month I was checking site stats and found a bunch of hits from CraigsList. It was some car dealer hotlinking to a red arrow I used to point to one of my offers. So I renamed a very "off color" image with the name of the arrow graphic and uploaded it.

              I would have loved to seen his face on this dealer when he found out that 11 of his CL ads now had a picture of a guy pointing to his bare butt with lipstick standing over "the deal of the week." You know, kiss my assets. Suprising how quick he took that down. I never had to say a word to him.
              Lol - very creative solution

              Will
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            • Profile picture of the author Troy Broussard
              Originally Posted by travlinguy View Post

              I would have loved to seen his face on this dealer when he found out that 11 of his CL ads now had a picture of a guy pointing to his bare butt with lipstick standing over "the deal of the week." You know, kiss my assets. Suprising how quick he took that down. I never had to say a word to him.
              Wow... that's hilarious... you've got quite a "dark" sense of humor... LOL
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  • Profile picture of the author incognito19
    Going back to your question about policies and other legal documents in your website and google's duplicate content penalty. The ideal solution is to place NOINDEX meta tags in the HEAD section of the legal documents HTML source code or protect the "document and\or legal" folder from indexing by using robots.txt. There is no (SEO?) reason to have those documents indexed by google.
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  • Profile picture of the author sbucciarel
    Banned
    I would not copy someone's privacy policy that has a custom privacy policy, particularly one done up at their expense by a lawyer. There should be open source ones available. Go to a blog using a plugin and copy that. There's a million of them or so.
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  • Profile picture of the author noble
    You're not going to get penalized for this. Look at the cookie cutter legal disclaimers out there that are required in certain types of sites.

    That being said next time google "privacy policy generator". It will ask you specific details like your site's name, your URL, whether you use any sort of cookies, etc. and instantly pump out a privacy policy specific to your site. Much easier than manually modifying an existing one.
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  • Profile picture of the author Newman8r
    you may as well set your privacy policy to noindex though just in case
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  • Profile picture of the author JenocideInside
    You shouldn't be penalized, this is highly unlikely.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lloyd Buchinski
    I've seen website legal notices with a copyright notice by a law firm (!) If you lift one of those they might get a little more enthusiastic about their law practice.

    It might be tedious work defending the interests of a client, but when you steal the property of a law firm, don't expect them to be subtle

    That might not fall into the normal routine of 'put in your time and get paid.' People can get nasty about that sort of stuff. You're not attacking some poor client. You're attacking them, personally.
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  • Profile picture of the author retsek
    "Note, we’ve decided to make this privacy policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use,"

    Privacy*Policy « Automattic
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  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    Another option is to hit Amazon for a book on cyber law. Many of them have model documents you can retype and customize.

    It's much cheaper to have your attorney review a document you've prepared in advance and suggest changes than it is to have him draw one up from scratch.

    Once you have one, do as others have suggested and hide it from the search spiders. There's no reason or value to having your legal pages indexed.
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