I'm not a lawyer. You should talk with one before doing anything. That said: I asked this question directly to my attorney a couple months ago, as she was revi

I'm not a lawyer. You should talk with one before doing anything. That said: I asked this question directly to my attorney a couple months ago, as she was reviewing a contract I had cobbled together from similar specimens I found on the web. She said that no, legal language found in contracts is not at all copyrightable in the USA. I've informally gotten the same response from a couple of other attorney friends over beers. The funny thing is, from what I've been able to find about copyright law - again, as an entrepreneur and as an open-source/free software programmer, not an attorney - there is no explicit exception I know of for contract language. My guess is that common legal practice has evolved so that the courts won't enforce it, and attorneys won't pursue it, for a basic reason: it would be overwhelmingly stupid to do otherwise. Contract language is normally intended to be precise, clear and unambiguous. If every contract had to be tweaked because some propane-tank business in Montana or something just happened to use the same wording before you did... well, that would be a minefield that makes the software patent mess look like a tranquil field of daisies in comparison.