----- Original Message ----- From: Cliff Lamere <clifflamere@global2000.net> To: <Dutch-Colonies-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 11:53 PM Subject: Re: Copyright Laws are widely misunderstood by genealogists > When I wrote to the list two days ago (Wednesday) about copyrights and the 1991 US Supreme Court decision, the message became too long to include further comment. At the time, I was only addressing the subject of the law and genealogists' rights, not genealogists' responsibilities to each other in spite of the law. > > The Court case involved a telephone company that tried to protect its telephone book of customer names, addresses and telephone numbers from being completely copied by another company. The second company published its own book and competed with the original company for yellow pages advertisers. The first company claimed that the new company should have to go door-to-door to get the information for themselves. The Court said that the second company had the right to copy all of the data that the original company had collected. The Court reaffirmed the importance to society of factual information being available to all parties. The country can only advance by building on what has been learned before, rather than everyone being required to do the original work for themselves. There would no time left for advancements to occur if we had to start at the beginning every time. > > The application of this court case to genealogy, as I see it, is that we can copy as much data from a website as we wish, including an entire database. When we visit a website, the website owner's copyright does not extend to the factual information such as the baptism, birth, marriage and death dates and places, or the names of the people involved. Only creative additions such as colors, backgrounds, fonts, bolded versus normal, choice of coding perhaps, and some other things would be protected by copyright. That means that on our personal computer, the data may NOT have the same look as it did on the website. However, when we do a copy and paste of the website records, the cut and paste procedure automatically eliminates all of the copyrighted features that I mentioned, so what we get is the raw, uncopyrighted data. > > We don't have the right to copy commentaries or stories. They would be copyright protected because they are creative efforts, although the facts in the commentary or story can be extracted (facts can't be copyrighted). If the records are arranged in some unusual manner, a copyright might extend to that unusual arrangement. Alphabetical or chronological arrangements in columns, tables, or in a paragraph form would not be unusual. Last name first would not be unusual. No matter how they are arranged on the website, the records themselves cannot be copyrighted. If they could have been, LDS probably would have done it long ago when they copied so many of the church record books which we so gratefully use on microfilm today. > > I believe that copying data from a website is legal. I have no idea about whether or not it is legal to repost it on a different website. Whether it is legal or it isn't, I feel certain that the vast majority of us are totally against anyone pirating another person's data to post on their own website without permission. And to pass it off as their own work would make the offense morally irresponsible, as Lorine has already pointed out. > > Because of the existence of links from one website to another, it should be completely unnecessary for a person to take data from another person's site to post on their own site. Such links allow a person to be creative in the selection of what subjects and titles they would like to see on their own website without having the actual data present. > > The really important thing about a link is that the person who did the work gets the credit for the weeks, months, perhaps years of effort that they expended. Nobody should try to take away from them the recognition that they deserve. If complete databases are lifted and then reposted elsewhere, we will lose talented, good-hearted people like Lorine from our midst. > > How genealogists act as a group will determine what website opportunities we have in the future. > > Cliff > > ______________________________