On 16 Jun 2011 at 15:13, Richard Ball wrote: > I would hardly call it a 'service'. It is an attempt, like so many > of this sort of web site, to gather free material to sell on to other > individuals and commercial enterprises. To use your material as their > stock in trade and to profit from it. Quite. > Essentially to join up you agree to provide anything and everything > you post to their web site freely and forever to their use, to sell on > or amend as they see fit. > > In return they specifically grant you no rights whatever to use or > store anything on their web with a few esceptions which may be stored > on your own personal computer only. And in so doing they encourage cut and paste genealogy. > You would effectively be granting Ancestry.com copyright in your > material and gaining nothing in return. > > Even by signing up to view the 'free' beta version you are granting > them these rights, including that to use your personal information as > they see fit. > > Read the 'terms': > > http://www.mundia.com/gb/TermsConditions > > among others: > > 5. Your content > For each item of content that you post, you grant to us and our > affiliates a world-wide, royalty free, fully paid-up, non-exclusive, > perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, and fully sublicensable > (including to other Website users) license, without additional > consideration to you or any third party, to: (i) reproduce ... > (effectivlely by any means possible) > > (ii) exercise all trademark, publicity and other proprietary rights > with regard to such content; > > (iii) use your name, photograph, portrait, picture, voice, likeness > and biographical information as provided by you in connection with > your content for the Service, in each case, in connection with your > content. For example, after your registration or subscription has > ended, we may continue to use and display any content that you > previously posted, and other users may continue may access, change, > edit, add to, subtract from or otherwise amend such content. > > If you do not want to grant us the rights set out in these Terms of > Use, please do not post any content on the Website. That is one of the reasons I have posted no content and do not intend to, nor do I intend to invite any of my family to make use of the service, or at least not until they have remedied the defects. > 6. Our content > Our Website contains software, trademarks, graphics, information, > data, editorial and other content ("Our Content"). We, our > affiliates or our respective licensors own, licensee or otherwise > have rights to use all intellectual property rights in and to our > Website and all Our Content. All such rights are reserved. ... > nothing in these Terms of Use gives you any right in respect of any > intellectual property ... > > 3. Your personal information > We collect, use and disclose your personal information in accordance > with our privacy policy (“Privacy Policy”) ... > > We may disclose your personal information: > * to our Affiliates ... > * to our third party service providers ... > * to trusted third party partners to allow them to send you > promotional offers. ... > > * to third party sponsors of promotions (irrespective of whether > those promotions are sponsored by us), ... > * to an Affiliate or other third party ... > * as we believe to be appropriate: Which is why I think it important for REAL genealogists to give them feedback on these and other problems, so that they can't say they have not been warned. My wife has been using the site, because we recently discovered a link to other genealogies that give another 8 generations back on her side of the family. She has discovered an enormous number of people who seem to be interested in this family (ELLWOOD of Cumbria - not a South African family). Yet though we have put this interest on various place3s on the internet, not one of them has bothered to contact us. Some have worked at duplicating the same research. One did most of the work in going back to the earlier generations, and the rest appeared to have just copied their work. She had written to them to discuss collaboration ans rouces, but the rest are just leeches, copying other people's work without a workd of thanks. And Ancestry encourages this, because they have tried very hard to lock people in by only make it possible to communicate within their site. That's where commercial motives come in. If, for example, you what to ask the source for something, they don't give you an e-mail address or web site to contact the person -- you can only send them an internal message in the site, which they would only see next time they log on, which they may not do for six months, a year, or never, and in the mean time everyone is being enabled to mcopy spurious information from their tree. So please, if you visit the site, click their "feedback" thingy and let them know what you think! -- Steve Hayes E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk Web: http://hayesstw.tumblr.com/ (follow me on Tumblr) Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com Phone: 083-342-3563 or 012-333-6727 Fax: 086-548-2525