How to develop/adapt legal "terms of use"

We are in process of building a site where we will seek user-generated content (video stories). We want to make sure we're covering our bases on our online legal release (e.g., 1. Minors appearing in videos must have parents consent. 2. Content may not be accurate and we're not responsible. 3. assuming we say we will "own" the video--can the originator still use it or sell it? 4. Can we be sued if someone grabs a video from our site and uses it in a way we didn't intend?  5. Other issues we haven't thought of yet???) Is there boilerplate language we can use, or do we need legal advice? 

Sounds like a really interesting project, but good planning to think ahead to any legal terms of service before you start. You might try having a look at some of the terms of use on other sites that use user-generated content (and guidelines for minors) such as That's Not Cool or blip.tv. It's a little dated, but this TechSoup article might also help shed some light on terms of service language. But I'd definitely run any language you come up with by a lawyer first just to be on the safe side.

You may also want to consider having your contributors license their material with the creative commons methods  http://creativecommons.org/ 

Another issue is does the contributor truly have the license to publish the video on your site, in other words do they truly own the content they are posting or was the content stolen from somewhere else?

You might want to poke around youtube for their policies

Dave