[Asterisk-Users] Teliax TOS copied from Vonage?

[Kevin Walsh]

John Todd [jtodd at loligo.com] wrote:
> It is my understanding, at least in the United States, that it is not
> possible to copyright contracts.  Thus, if someone has a contract you
> like, you may use it.  (I am not a lawyer.  Use my advice at your
> peril.)  Using someone else's blood-mon... er, lawyer's fees, seems
> like a wise business decision if you're content with the result of a
> non-customized contract. 
> 
In the UK, which may be different from other countries, any published
work is automatically covered by copyright.  You don't need to apply
for copyright protection and there are no exceptions.  This being the
case (in the UK) a contact's text would be covered by copyright law.

It should also be noted that contracts have been written and published
for so long that a lot of the original copyright protections will have
expired.  Also, a lot of "standard" contract text is available from the
public domain.  That still doesn't give people the right to copy a
contract verbatim;  Some of the clauses may end up looking similar but
one cannot simply copy an entire body of text and just replace the
company name.

It should also be pointed out that a "terms of service" document is
usually not a contract.  The contract may stipulate that the TOS must
be adhered to, and that the TOS may change from time to time, but the
actual TOS is usually a separate entity to any actual contract between
a service provider and its customer.  If the USA has some sort of
weird copyright exemption for contracts then that will probably not
cover the TOS document nor any other document referenced in the
contract.

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