Avoiding Copyright Infringement
By Lori McLeod Wilke
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~formyfamily/

I found the article on copyrighting in last week's RootsWeb Review very timely and worth a little bit more spotlighting.

Recently, I found a privately owned online database that contained the names of some of my direct line ancestors. Interested to see what information was contained there for my family members, I surfed on in. Imagine my surprise to see that the page concerning my great-great-grandfather was identical to the page on my website!

When I say identical, I do mean identical; someone had copied and then pasted my page into this database. As I began to look at other individuals in my family, I found more and more pages that had also been copied and pasted. I stopped counting at 53 pages.

My website contains some information that is considered to be part of the public domain such as birth, marriage and death dates, transcriptions of obituaries etc., but the majority of my individual webpages are made up of my essays regarding what is known of my ancestors' daily lives, their relationships with families of the area, both related and non-related and other events both historical and personal. And those original essays are copyrighted.

The owner of that database had attempted to copyright my essays. I initially wrote the owner and asked him to simply properly source me as the author of those essays and give a link back to my website for updated information, but after 10 months with no action on his part, I had to resort to a legal cease-and-desist letter and insist that the essays be removed.

I can imagine that some of you are wondering why the upset? There are two reasons: First, I spent hours writing those essays and creating a website and publishing it to the Internet and I did not appreciate someone else trying to claim it by copyright as their work. Secondly, and more important for genealogical reasons, this gentleman did not research my family and in fact could give me no clue as to how or where he even got the information i.e. whether he himself copied and pasted it in or if it was submitted to him by someone else. Since he was not researching my family, his database was unlikely ever to be updated with
more current or accurate information. In fact, those pages on his database contained quite a bit of now outdated information and many other mistakes (such as two gentlemen being combined into one person).

This difficult situation could have been avoided completely had the database owner simply given proper sourcing credit and a link to the page where he found the information. Had this been done, viewers of his database could have been pointed toward my webpages, which are constantly being updated with new information. All would have been OK.

Copyright aside -- all genealogical researchers should remember to place the Web address (URL) and title page information in their research notes, not only to give proper crediting, but to enable themselves and others to be able to backtrack to ensure that the information is always the most current and accurate.

REPRINTS. Permission to reprint articles from RootsWeb Review is granted unless specifically stated otherwise, provided: (1) the reprint is used for non-commercial, educational purposes; and (2) the following notice appears at the end of the article: Previously published in RootsWeb Review: 7 December 2005, Vol. 8, No. 49.

For the previous week see:
http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/review/2005/1130.txt
1b. TIPS FROM READERS
      Examining False Copyright Claims
      By James F. Ramaley, Ph.D. [log in to unmask]

Joy

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