GF> You have to admit that you and your company are making a dime. Yes, Ancestry.com is "making a dime." In fact, Ancestry is one of the few Internet companies that does make money. Ancestry began as a publishing company over 15 years ago and started the web site as a supplement to the publishing business. Until recently, most of the data that required a subscription on Ancestry's site was the kind of data that Ancestry and competitors have been selling in book or journal form for decades--books and journals that genealogists, or the libraries they use, have been purchasing all that time. I do believe that we give good value for the money. I know some, perhaps many, people will disagree, especially if their particular research interests are not well served by what we have currently online. I don't have to work full-time, I have turned down other offers, and I would not stay with Ancestry if I thought the company was ripping people off. GF> And you have to admit that I am not making money so I don't GF> have a penny for a lawsuit against you and your company GF> which makes it easier for your company to use my data without GF> asking me. So, companies can use any excuse needed to squelch me. Yes, I admit that you are not making money and don't have a penny for a lawsuit, But I don't know why you would want to sue us. I can't speak to what other companies do, but I think Ancestry has a good record of fair dealing on data and intellectual property, whether on the print side or the electronic data side, and whether it is data that we pay for or data that is contributed for free, as in the case of the Gedcom files posted on the World Tree. I'll say more about the World Tree in a later message, but you might want to look at the submitter agreement at http://www.ancestry.com/worldtree/subagreement.htm. We do not claim ownership of the data, we agree not to sell it, and we only claim copyright in the compilation in order to prevent others from downloading the whole site and using it without the permission of either the submitter or Ancestry. I will admit that our record is not absolutely spotless. We did make a mistake in one significant case back in October. As soon as Ancestry's management realized what had happened, we removed the data in question, made amends to the originating society, and tightened up procedures in order to avoid future mistakes. It is very unlikely that we would sue anybody, especially an individual. The company's mission is to make information widely available at a fair price. Suing people is not likely to contribute to that goal. And our vice president for legal affairs is a former LDS church attorney with a background in making the genealogical resources widely available. > Unless someone requests more family info from me because I > supposedly submitted data to a company or they send me to Ancestry > or FTM or another business site, I don't have time to check them out. > > I really want to say here, ahhhh, my time is spent spending > hundreds of dollars to put free censuses, births, rosters, etc on > the Macoupin page, but I won't. I could have made my money back by > selling all this information to Macoupin researchers. Anyway, as > long as I don't think about making money, it doesn't bother me. I think this supports my point that there is a cost involved in all data on the web (or in print). With the work you have done, you have chosen to bear the cost yourself, thus subsidizing the end user. I have made the results of my own personal research freely available to people without any thought of selling it. And in my work at the National Archives I coordinated many, many projects that used volunteers to index or do preservation work on records in the regional archives. Many people see the results of that as being "free," but there were substantial costs. The volunteers themselves bore the cost of the labor, and you paid for the supplies and the administrative direction every April 15. Ancestry does not have tax revenue to pay for costs up front, generally does not have volunteer labor, and must charge to recover the costs of acquiring data and running the business. However, as I pointed out in an earlier message, Ancestry does post data for free access when it is contributed by individuals or societies. In fact, Ancestry's most searched databases are free. And Ancestry's search engine does add value to contributed databases by making it possible to search hundreds, soon thousands, of individual databases at one time. More will follow, either later today or early tomorrow.