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Ask HN: How legal is it to translate another website?
1 point by jlengrand on Oct 18, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
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.



Entirely 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)


I 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

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.


[deleted]


Thx 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.


>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.


You should be fine dude...

Has there ever been a case in history of someone getting sued over translating something?


Well, Yahoo doesn't agree with you :s

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130118040357AA...




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