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Ask HN: How legal is it to translate another website?
Most of the things I read on the web are in English.
And some of those resources are really famous, but only available in the english language. Being French, I often hear a lot of frustration from people that cannot read english properly.
I was wondering how legal it would be to actually translate some of those websites, cite the source each time and try to get some traffic going.
- doubt_me 13y agoYou should be fine dude... Has there ever been a case in history of someone getting sued over translating something?
- jlengrand 13y agoWell, Yahoo doesn't agree with you :s http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130118040357AAZ4Wgm http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130118040357AA...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jlengrand 13y agoThx for the answer. Ok. So I suppose this would also be completely legal to put ads on such a website? This sounds just a bit tricky for me to make money on translating something without having the agreement from the original author first.
- lmm 13y ago>it would be same as if you read a French book and wrote it in your own words. Which would be copyright infringement. See e.g. The Wind Done Gone.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lmm 13y agoEntirely illegal. Your work would be a derivative of the original site, and as such they would have a copyright claim on it. If you're profiting off it as well that's probably enough to make it criminal rather than just a civil matter. (Whether anyone would do anything about it is of course another question)
- asperous 13y agoI was wrong: "Derivative works are infringing if they are not created with the permission of the copyright holder." http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/copy-corner73.htm http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/copy-corner73.htm IANAL: The most moral thing to do is obviously just ask the authors if it's okay to translate the work and link back to them. I really doubt most of them would have any problems with that. Most likely you'd simply be asked to take down any material if a copyright owner didn't like it before you got into any legal troubles.