I have a few different sections on my site. One of them is on nutrition, where i post articles i've written myself. I wanted to put a disclaimer on there. Should i check other sites for ideas, or should i make one up myself?
As an attorney I can tell you that the way to go is to look for help from other sources. There is no need to recreate the wheel. While I would not suggest that you copy a disclaimer wholesale without permission, looking at others will give you some good ideas and some formulaic language that you can use. Recently someone e-mailed me and said that they were looking for a legal disclaimer and privacy policy and came across my site - IPWatchdog.com - and wanted to know if they could just copy some of my terms and conditions. I had no problem with that. If you find something that is particularly helpful you might want to contact the source and see if they mind if you copy some of their terms. If all you are doing is taking bits and pieces here and there you don't have to worry though. The law with respect to form language is that it is likely not copyrightable. Any time there are a limited number of ways to say something there cannot be copyright protection. For example, there are only so many ways to say "we will not sell your personal information to others..." so that type of language would not be copyrightable anyway. I hope this helps. -Gene Copyright Law
Have you thought about using a Creative Commons License. With a Creative Commons licence, you are able to keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit, etc and only on the conditions that you specify. More info can be found here (http://creativecommons.org/license/).