Re: Ancestry, piracy, and so forth Yes, I've had that problem as well. I've gone and ASKED if I could add pictures, info someone has on a relative of mine. I have found so many mistakes in the two trees I'm working on at the moment. I posted two of them, but kept my copies as a reference to catch the errors and correct them. I agree that there is nothing anyone can do about piracy of information, and understand why many of you don't post the entire tree or just don't post a tree at all. It take many,many hours of research and for someone to "claim" it as their own is just plain silly. I've gone and put the trees I have done as private so no one can see it, and that's helped somewhat. I do have a question that may never be answered but might cause a stir (I do apologize if I have offended anyone here) are these people who lift the research either dumb or just plain lazy to the point that they take credit for work someone else has done? Puzzled, Kendall -- *Do not meddle in the affair of Dragons...for you are crunchy and good with ketchup....*

Kendall >From my experience in over forty years of researching, both for genealogy and other pursuits, I have found an incredible ignorance of the law, good research practice, and, frankly, "ownership ethics." I'd never admit it in public, but I "may" have slipped up a time or two myself. . . The law is pretty simple -- there are copyright laws, they can be researched, and abided by. Asking permission to quote is not that hard, either. You'd be amazed how many times I went head-to-head with colleagues who thought it was ok to print out thirty copies of an entire workbook for a class because "we are government employees and the copyright laws do not apply to us." WHA???? Or, "it came from xxx university and because they get tax money, they cannot copyright it." Wow. Or, the music director who doesn't have enough copies/money to supply the very large choir and who feels that as a "non-profit" the laws don't count. Whew??? BUT, that aside, copyright laws ONLY apply to works of the mind -- music, poetry, essays, etc. Copyright laws do not apply to "facts" or "information." There is no protection for "my hard work, sweat, expense, time. . . ." in gathering such facts or information from whatever source -- Aunt Mabel, the county courthouse, the census . .. So, that's the short and not very sweet version of the legal issues. In real life, of course, it's more complicated, but should suffice for our purposes here. The vast amount of our researching (read Sweat) is not protected by anyone. NOW, the question become "are people 'claiming' this research product as 'theirs?'" My experience would lead me to say "probably not." In many cases, I suspect the offender does not even know where or when s/he got the information. The person who is offending may be the fifth person in a line between the original compiler of the information and the product you see. Note how many "sources" include someone else's gedcom or other file. They are lifting wholesale, not through malice, but through ignorance of the professional, ethical, method of doing things. In a few cases where I have personally talked to an offender about this sort of thing the response was basically...oh, I didn't know there was a problem there -- if they didn't want to share why did they (a) compile the book (b) put up the tree on the web (c) leave that information in the historical society. . . . A much bigger problem for me is not who has sweat equity in the work, but how well the information is evaluated and documented. Even the statement "Pat told me..." gives the next user a better opportunity to evaluate what I said, and if I'm still around, come ask me where I got the information. Better still would be: "Pat told me. . . and she had gotten the information from. . . ." What is less ok is bypassing the "first informant" and going straight to "...the information (came) from..." Problem there is that without identifying the compiler/indexer (me) the next person in line has no way to "trust" the information. Regardless of that, any researcher worth his/her salt will re-visit the research, and the "original" source is critical. And, of course "I" am only the original source on when I was married, when my children were born, and such like that. Finally -- lazy? -- perhaps, I think some really do want to spend a minimal amount of time for maximum results. They probably run their lives that way. "Dumb?" I'd prefer "ignorant." No one has taught them about this. "Taking credit?" -- probably not usually. How often do any of these trees indicate that the poster "takes credit" for the research? Unfortunately, they are generally silent on all such claims. Of course there are those who plagiarized their way through school, hired people to take the SAT (or whatever the equivalent was). Like the poor, I guess unethical people will always be with us. But, the vast majority of people posting trees are, in my opinion, simply unknowing and unthinking. "Unknowing" we can fix. "Unthinking" is a bit harder. Wow -- two sermons today. One at church, and now here I am, delivering another. Pat In Tucosn -----Original Message----- From: roots-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:roots-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Kendall Caminiti Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2012 7:35 AM To: roots@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [ROOTS-L] ROOTS Digest, Vol 7, Issue 118 Re: Ancestry, piracy, and so forth Yes, I've had that problem as well. I've gone and ASKED if I could add pictures, info someone has on a relative of mine. I have found so many mistakes in the two trees I'm working on at the moment. I posted two of them, but kept my copies as a reference to catch the errors and correct them. I agree that there is nothing anyone can do about piracy of information, and understand why many of you don't post the entire tree or just don't post a tree at all. It take many,many hours of research and for someone to "claim" it as their own is just plain silly. I've gone and put the trees I have done as private so no one can see it, and that's helped somewhat. I do have a question that may never be answered but might cause a stir (I do apologize if I have offended anyone here) are these people who lift the research either dumb or just plain lazy to the point that they take credit for work someone else has done? Puzzled, Kendall