Alpha forking is commonly illegal insystem (though enforcement is going to be lax, I imagine). Beta forks have limited if any rights in many polities, as they're commonly split off as a part of customs or as a limited work assistant. The Beta trait suggests the kind of limitations being a Beta imposes on a mind, so it's not hard to see why spinning off a Beta for more than a planned deletion is something most authorities want to clamp down on (PR points if nothing else). Since Betas are so often spun off as glorfied accessible memory banks, anything less than a Beta is going to be objectively questionable as being sentient, and legally holds no rights even in cases of the loss of the root identity. At that point, the fork is so pruned and limited that at best, the most liberal polities will designate the fork as akin to someone who needs a guardian of some sort, and civic rights will be limited. The big obstacle for alpha forking is that you have a very limited timeframe before the alpha fork becomes another person by the more liberal definitions, and perhaps more immediately, more time apart means more difficulty merging. A lot of more conservative polities will use this as their excuse for limiting forking rights (let alone a place with a "morph for every ego" law). Forking is rarely an involuntary act, so most forking rights issues will place the onus upon the original (i.e. sleeved in most cases) entity. Ironically, this means that established forks might enjoy public support in comparison with their originators. Whether that translates into law is dependent on the civics you need for the game. Forknapped alphas are another kettle of fish entirely. In all likelyhood, they're separate entities, both in practice and in law. But in the case where a forknapped alpha or beta who has nevertheless established themselves as a distinct person (per applicable local personhood laws), the relationship between them, their originator, and the localized society is going to be very dependent on the local particulars. That's not a cop-out: this sort of deliberation depends on a tremendous number of factors, not least of which is if the fork desires merging or not.