
Ask HN: How legal is it to translate another website? - jlengrand
Most of the things I read on the web are in English.<p>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.<p>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.
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lmm
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)

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asperous
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](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.

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doubt_me
You should be fine dude...

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

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jlengrand
Well, Yahoo doesn't agree with you :s

[http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130118040357AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130118040357AAZ4Wgm)

