On 29/06/13 18:24, MB wrote: > Why is it that online sites insist on messing things up against the > wishes of the users. Something similar has happened on Flickr and > Google so it all the time, making their sites progressively worse. Most of the online genealogy websites are run by profit-making companies and their primary interest is in their bottom line. The best way for them to increase their profit is to increase the number of subscribers, and that's most easily done by targeting new, careless genealogists: people who don't really care whether they've found the right person, or perhaps more accurately, who don't understand enough to know they may not have found the right person. And if you're targeting idiots, it helps to have an idiot-proof interface. That may irritate the experienced users, but who cares? They're a small minority, and will probably keep paying anyway because the major sites are pretty much equally bad. To a large extent, we, the more experienced part of genealogical community, have allowed this to happen because we've unintentionally created an environment where only a company with a lot of money can compete. What do I mean by this? Over the years, enthusiastic genealogists have gone to huge efforts to transcribe all sorts of records, but particularly parish registers. Why, you might ask, hasn't someone taken these and built a decent website for searching them? Technically it wouldn't be at all difficult. The problem is a legal one. All these transcripts are generally copyright, and are often encumbered with highly restrictive licensing restrictions. Take the various online parish clerks websites. The one I most frequently use says "No person or organisation may publish this data without express written permission." The copyright is held by the original transcribers, some of whom, it's reasonable to suppose, are now dead, and therefore I doubt that legally, the OPC maintainers could grant permission for someone to reproduce these if they wished. (On the odd occasion I've contributed, I've never been asked to give them the right to do that.) Or look at the FreeREG project, which is maintained by a charity. "Data extracted from FreeREG must not be reproduced in any form." At least in that case, copyright is (if their website is correct) assigned to the FreeBMD trustees. Why should the transcribers care whether people reproduce the data? Surely if someone has gone to the effort to make a transcript and make it available online, they would wish to maximise its usefulness? I can understand wanting to retain the credit for it, but that's possible, as shown by the Creative Commons 'by-sa' licence used on Wikipedia and elsewhere. I can also understand wanting to prohibit commercial use of the transcript, but there are plenty of standard licences that ensure that, e.g. the Creative Commons 'by-nc-sa' licence. If all this data was available under a permissive licence like this, it would be relatively easy for a competent programmer to set up a website that included all this data and provided sophisticated searching facilities of the sort wanted by the more experienced genealogists. And if that website didn't suit, another person could make an alternative. Richard

On Sat, 29 Jun 2013 22:27:41 +0100, Richard Smith <richard@ex-parrot.com> wrote: >To a large extent, we, the more experienced part of genealogical >community, have allowed this to happen because we've unintentionally >created an environment where only a company with a lot of money can >compete. What do I mean by this? Over the years, enthusiastic >genealogists have gone to huge efforts to transcribe all sorts of >records, but particularly parish registers. Why, you might ask, hasn't >someone taken these and built a decent website for searching them? >Technically it wouldn't be at all difficult. The problem is a legal >one. All these transcripts are generally copyright, and are often >encumbered with highly restrictive licensing restrictions. > >Take the various online parish clerks websites. The one I most >frequently use says "No person or organisation may publish this data >without express written permission." The copyright is held by the >original transcribers, some of whom, it's reasonable to suppose, are now >dead, and therefore I doubt that legally, the OPC maintainers could >grant permission for someone to reproduce these if they wished. (On the >odd occasion I've contributed, I've never been asked to give them the >right to do that.) Or look at the FreeREG project, which is maintained >by a charity. "Data extracted from FreeREG must not be reproduced in >any form." At least in that case, copyright is (if their website is >correct) assigned to the FreeBMD trustees. 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. -- Steve Hayes Web: http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/ http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afgen/