I have a client who has a fancy facebook page and it looking to create a website that mirrors some of the facebook functionality. I started developing the interface and moved to wondering just how much of facebook can be cloned or copied. I’m assuming that have some sort of copyright on their site. What point does it go from being a generic blog/posting/comment site to copyrighted material of facebook. We are looking at the ability for users to make post, comments on post and can like both comments and post. Also with a similar layout and format to facebook.Hhowever we are not sure if this is possible. How much can be copied?
I done a decent search into this and have found no information. Nothing on what can be mirrored and nothing about facebooks copyright. Only information on peoples details being copyright and the like. Is there any information on this? Where can I find it?
I’m also interest in what you guys thing is the responsibility for the developer. According to my client it is my responsibility to know copyright information and to find all this out. I can see my clients side but I’m not a lawyer and this is well beyond my expertise and anything I have professional experience with. Generally I conduct developed according to client specifications. What are your thought on this? How it is normally conducted? I cannot confidently make advise on the subject of copyright material.
Don’t worry about it. You can emulate most of these things without concern. It’s not really “copyright” you are dealing with, but rather Facebook’s rather flimsy patents.
It is highly unlikely that Facebook would sue you succesfully. Even to get to that point, you would have to present a significant threat to their business, which would be a long way away given that you don’t seem to have started coding anything.
The only issue would be if you were to exactly copy/paste Facebook’s CSS, HTML or Javascript files into your own code (which I don’t think is what you’re planning to do).