-2

In general, what is the legality of website forking?

I am based in the United Kingdom and intending to host my website on U.S. or Canadian servers.

I am looking at creating a website about automobiles (with original MSRPs and specs) that is a sort of fork of http://www.autos.ca or http://www.parkers.co.uk in terms of design, but not content (the site would be less news-driven, more original research and automobile history-based).

I also have a small project for an online radio station, maintaining the site every so often - it's a WordPress site, I manage it but have no access to the Apache/Linux side, and they want to go to a design more like http://www.pulse1.co.uk but how would you fork the design for a PHP-based site (Pulse 1 does not use PHP, according to BuiltWith) and avoid copyright infringement?

I know that software can be forked, but how often is website forking done, and what do I need to do to keep it compliant, and avoid copyright infringement (even though I am not copying from the original sites, and all content is my own original research, apart from the images).

If anyone could advise me, I would appreciate the advice.

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    We cannot give you legal advice here. But tread carefully: the look and feel of a website may be protected by trademark law. You are certainly not allowed to copy/steal assets from another site. “Forking” refers to open source projects. The concept does not apply to closed-source software. Commented Oct 7, 2017 at 11:46
  • 1
    The concept of forking does not apply to websites as it is a procedure in open source projects for making a copy of an existing project before continuing it on a different path of development than the current project team is using. What you are talking about is cloning the look and feel of a website that you like, basically stealing the design which someone else has paid for without paying for it yourself. This is the kind of thing that people end up in court over. If you are taking images from the original sites they you are copying from them and taking their content. Commented Oct 7, 2017 at 11:59

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

You don't understand the term 'forking'. It refers to open source projects where two or more groups of contributors want to take the project in different directions.

Say I submit a pull request to mysql which adds a new datatype "breedOfCat". The PR is refused because the maintainers of mysql dont want to change mysql into a cat specfic database.

As I cant get my PR accepted, but mysql is open source, I can copy the entire source code for mysql, call it ewanSql and add my cat datatype.

I cant do this unless the code is open source as that would be a breach of copyright

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    How does this answer the question? OP's question was not about the definition forking, he just used the wrong term. Commented Oct 7, 2017 at 12:53
  • 1
    I think it goes a bit deeper than that. feel free to add an answer where you replace the terms with what you think they meant though Commented Oct 7, 2017 at 16:50

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.