On 15 February 2016 at 03:35, Penny Trueman via <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't know about the other sites but, when you sign up with Ancestry you > agree that what you 'post' becomes THEIR property; which is why you cannot > download it. > > Not quite. The "ownership" (i.e. the Intellectual Property Rights in whatever form ,such as Copyright) **remains** with the original creator (i.e. the poster if it's original content). See http://www.ancestry.co.uk/cs/legal/termsandconditions#UserContent - "Except for the rights granted in this Agreement, Ancestry acquires no title or ownership rights in or to any User Provided Content you submit and nothing in this Agreement conveys any ownership rights in such User Provided Content on the Websites." So it's NOT their property. (And of course, sometimes it's not even the property of the poster, but we'll slide over that). What you actually do is grant Ancestry a **permanent** **licence** to use the material that you post. "You grant Ancestry and its Group Companies a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicenseable, world-wide, royalty-free license for the maximum amount of time permitted by applicable law to host, store, copy, publish, distribute, provide access to and otherwise use User Provided Content uploaded or otherwise submitted by you to the Websites". Some of that is practical and is the same everywhere - if you don't grant them a licence to copy your material then they can't back it up and can't show it on Ancestry.com if you submitted it to Ancestry.co.uk. Where people often disagree is that the agreement allows Ancestry to index your stuff (so how else will anyone find it???) and it then becomes a permanent part of the sales offering provided by Ancestry. So Ancestry unquestionably benefit from your work. Everyone really has to make up their own mind whether this is acceptable or not and I'm not about to criticise anyone who decides "no". I'm happy with the Terms - but even I don't tend to load photos up there - I've seen too many photos stored against people who died before photography was invented and I really don't want to see my father's photo used as a portrait of someone else entirely who just happens to have the same name. Personal decisions. You can certainly download your tree as a GEDCOM. You can sync your tree and images to your FTM database on your PC. I presume that would sync any of your own provided content. What you can't do is download the images and / or user provided content in a GEDCOM to your own PC. Frankly, I wouldn't allow it either as that would make it far to easy for someone to create a GEDCOM containing whole counties worth of census images, which they could then sell on. You can download stuff to your PC one image at a time. Adrian