On 30/06/13 02:39, Steve Hayes wrote: > I suspect that that copyright restriction was aimed at preventing companies > with a lot of money reproducing the transcriptions and then charging people to > view them. I'm sure you're right. But my point is that they've gone about it in such a heavy-handed way that they've ended up indirectly playing into the hands of exactly those companies with lots of money. These things have been looked at by people who know far more about intellectual property law than I do, and probably rather more than your typical OPC maintainer. The Creative Commons people are a good example. There are plenty of licensing strategies that allow you to prevent prevent commercial use at all, but leave non-commercial user free to reuse the transcripts. Similarly, there are plenty of licensing strategies that don't prohibit commericial use per se, but do prevent those companies from adding additional restrictions to that data. To take a concrete example, suppose the Hampshire OPCs decided to relicense all their transcripts under the cc-by-sa licence[1], a licence which does allow commercial use. Ancestry could come along and add those transcripts to their site. They could restrict access to paying customers, and they could give you (if so minded) super-advanced search facilities over it. But they couldn't stop you from republishing any Hants OPC data that you download from the site. Richard [1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/