On Wednesday, January 17, 2001, Cliff Lamere <[email protected]> wrote: > "A genealogy consisting merely of transcriptions of public records, such as > census or courthouse records, or transcriptions made from headstones in a > few local cemeteries, are also deemed by the Copyright Office to lack > minimal creativity. On the other hand, the creativity requirement may be > satisfied if the creator of a genealogy compilation USES JUDGEMENT IN > SELECTING MATERIAL FROM A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT SOURCES (my emphasis)." > > A genealogy is defined by the Random House College Dictionary (1982) as "a > record or account of the ancestry and descent of a person, family, group, > etc." "the study of family ancestries and histories" "lineage". When many people think of a genealogy, they think of a "lineage", i.e. data expressed in a standard (e.g. tree) structure with names and dates, as opposed to a book with many details provided for each family, expressed in your own creative fashion. The former would generally not be protected; the latter may well be, and this is the distinction that the copyright office is trying to make. In the latter case, you still can't prevent someone from taking the raw data and reexpressing it in, e.g. a tree structure, because facts can't be copyrighted. > Including the normal information of birth, marriage and death and all > children for a married couple doesn't show much judgement. However, what if > there were frequently two or three sources of a date or place of birth (or > marriage or death) for some of the people? Now judgement would be required > to "select" the data that will be recorded in a genealogy. If a person > looks at the information on one of the largest sites, that of the Latter Day > Saints, they will find much conflicting data for a single individual that > was submitted by perhaps ten different people. The person must use > judgement to sort these out, and may even compare the data with that of > several other websites (having equally conflicting data) before making a > final judgement. Does this make the genealogy copyrightable? Not if you're just choosing a date and leaving it at that; it's still just a fact. I think the creativity requirement you quote is really talking about something other than dates. For example, your written description of why you chose one date over another would be copyrightable. Including that source description on the same page as the person in question would make it harder for someone to legally copy the data on that page (because of the way photocopiers work), but it wouldn't prevent them from doing so. > A person must choose to include or exclude all of the siblings of ancestors > in their genealogy. I don't think this would make a difference, since it's still a compilation of public records in a standard format. > A person must decide whether to include sources for > major amounts of their data, or just a selected few pieces of data, or none > of their data. By this time, it sounds to me like the genealogy qualifies > for copyright. Again, the copyright only extends to creative expression. As a result you can copyright an extensive genealogy but still have large portions of it be unprotected. > It is not likely to be completely accurate as to the facts, and may even > include wrong people in it. It sounds to me like any serious genealogy > (requiring more than a minimum of research) would be copyrightable. The operative word here is "serious". I've seen many family history books that would qualify in general for copyright protection. But the trees one finds on the Internet (e.g. at LDS) don't. > That having been said, what protection would such a copyright give the > author? Could I also publish a genealogy with all of the same people in it > (presented differently), even if some of them were wrong? I don't think a > valid copyright on a genealogy prevents other people from using the data. > Isn't a valid copyright on a genealogy almost useless to the author? If you publish a book, it keeps people from copying it wholesale and redistributing it. This is also true even if you publish an extensive GEDCOM on the Internet. But you're never going to be able to prevent people from extracting data and including it in their genealogies. Does this make it not worthwhile? There's still enough of a market for your printed genealogy, as is, that you could recover the cost of printing the book by selling it to your cousins. But don't expect to get rich off of it :-). S R C A cott obert ranston nderson [email protected]