I am putting a project idea out so I have been lurking around on scriptlance and joomlancer and all the freelance site. I see people all the time asking to clone sites. I see a lot of the howework help site offer the same features etc So can you clone a site if you use a different name? How much of it needs to be original?
Clone is such an evil word. It can mean many things in many contexts. If you look all around the internet you will notice at most 10-15 original ideas for web sites. The rest are all copies, clones, or derived from a comibination of all of them. We will call them blended...lol 1. Directory (Yahoo) 2. Search (Google, Yahoo, etc) 3. News (Google, Yahoo, etc) 4. Personal Home Page (Millions of them) 5. Blog (Kind of derived from a Personal Home page with guest book) 6. Guest Book 7. Forum (Derived from a Guest Book I guess) 8. eCommerce Site (Amazon, Walmart,etc) 9. Classifieds 10. eMail 11. Payment Gateway (Paypal.com) Almost other site is made up from different combinations of these 10 types of sites. Whether its myspace.com, elance.com, etc, they all cloned, copied, or got their ideas from these 10 core types of site. Here are some examples of cloned sites: Search Yahoo.com Goto.com Ask.com Google.com and thousands of others. Directory Yahoo.com DMOZ and thousands of othres Payment Gateways Paypal.com Stormpay.com and plenty of other badly ripped off copies. eCommerce Amazon.com BN.com BooksAMillion.com etc, etc... I think you get my point is that with the web and internet nothing is original. Everything is either a copy, clone, or blended version of something else. This includes sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us, etc... If you site back and really think about it everybody copied, cloned, blended and based all their ideas off of Yahoo.... Mike ps. This is just my 2 Cents and you can choose to ignore it if you wish...
Copying a site verbatim is asking to get sued. To me a clone is an identical copy. If you do not own the original you have no right to copy.
Meaning of Clone: A product that functions like another. The clone, which may be hardware, software or both, may not look exactly like the original, but it implies 100% functional compatibility with it. Fed the same input, the clone should produce the same output. Unless there are graphical similarities or business model patents its all fair game. After all can you imagine an internet filled with only Yahoo. Its a good thing they didn't pull a Jeff bezos and patent 1 Click Searching... Disclaimer: And I am not a fan of business model patents but have applied in the past for provisional patents while marketing a couple of my applications for sale. Also, be aware if you have incorporated in some US states you cannot defend yourself pro se in court if you get sued by another corporation. You will have to hire an attorney. If you are an individual getting sued you can.
Let's get this into different perspective. I have worked on couple of clone sites, people while asking for cloning a site, normally are of two types. Either they want everything thing to be same (all functionalities), and just a change in logo and title would keep them happy. But on the other hand, the offers which I get for cloning a site is relatively different, they ask us to develop a site that as GOOD other site, without coping any content, they just provide us a idea of what they need (cos not all clients are designers and programmers). Its up to the web developer, to bring into a unique site that would appeal. Certainly I have a current project going, where the client makes sure he doesn’t copy a 100% duplicate of other site, from layout to programming we had been changing almost all, it was just a idea put forth by him, as what kind of of site he likes. So cloning works in most of freelancer site depends on how they explain you stuffs, but some literally ask myspace flickr youtube digg and so on. Regards, Dreamchaser
By clone, they mean similar website. No one want a website that looks exactly like another one. What they are asking for is the same features and functions that the original website has. Anyway, it is easy to the functions and biz modle of a website. What is NOT easy to reproduce is the success and popularity of a website.