Genealogy facts (or any facts) cannot be copyrighted in my opinion. A fact is a fact. If Uncle Bill was born in 1808 in SC and you post it to a board - you don't own that information. On the other hand, if you make a webpage and put pretty designs on it and post that Uncle Bill was born in 1808 SC and someone takes your webpage, designs and all, and makes their own webpage using your layout - THEN you have a copyright violation. If you copy out of a book using the exact words that someone else wrote, you violate their copyright. If you take the same words, mix them around, then you no longer have violated the copyright even though it says the same basic thing. Do you see my point? Facts alone do not belong to any one person. If a fact could be copyrighted, then you would never be able to open a library book and copy the genealogy data it contains and apply it to your own tree. You do this all the time with no qualms, don't you? If Ancestry.com takes your post and puts it verbatim on a CD they want to sell, then they should be guilty of copyright infringement. I don't know what happens to the law though if you post to a site and somewhere in little letters, they have said, in effect, "anything you post to their board becomes their property", especially after the fact. It is just plain annoying though, that something that started out as "free" for researchers, can be taken away from us at anytime because of a change in ownership of the space that holds the posts. It also irritates me that I had to figure out how to do a password to access material I had already posted to the site. There are many good websites on the Internet that explain copyright. If you are interested in reading about the subject, just use any search engine (my favorite is www.google.com). Just my opinion, Janice Mauldin Castleman Researching THOMPSON-GAINES-WINCHESTER in Pickens Co., SC