On Wed, 18 Mar 1998, George W. Durman wrote: > Hello Bob. Not sure what you mean by "thieves". I had always > thought that we put databases on the Web for others to search AND > extract info from. Don't see any difference from printing out pages of > trees and info, and getting the whole thing. Any database I post to my > web site that comes from me is "free for the picking". Likewise to any > databases from others that I post. They have all given their permission > for these databases to become public domain. > > If I'm missing something, please let me know, > SgtGeorge > George, I think there are some points you are missing here: (1) Just because you are happy for your database to be public domain doesn't mean that everyone else feels the same way. I have heard of people being upset that their published family history was sold for commercial gain without permission. (2) The border between viewing a page and copying it is somewhat fuzzy, but copying data and incorporating it into your own database is definitely a breach of copyright if done without permission. See http://www.clari.net/brad/copymyths.html (3) If you do want to make your data public domain why not simply allow people to download the original GEDCOM? This makes the HTML2GED program superfluous, and avoids the errors likely to be introduced by the double conversion. Bob ====================================================================== Bob Vickers R.Vickers@dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk Dept of Computer Science, Royal Holloway College, University of London WWW: http://www.cs.rhbnc.ac.uk/home/bobv Phone: +44 1784 443691