Here is the text of an article in today's Salt Lake City newspaper. It mentions that familysearch.org will be officially launched at press confereneces in Washington and Salt Lake City this Monday. This confirms rumors that were floating around the FHL this past week. On Thursday, the library had posted notices that the second floor of the FHL would be closed to the public on Monday morning for a special event, but most staff members had professed to not know what the special event was. Altered bill 'protects' online roots By Lee Davidson Deseret News Washington correspondent WASHINGTON - Rep. Chris Cannon has won changes to a bill he says should provide protection that the LDS Family History Center needs as it begins to share genealogy via the Internet. Aides said it should help prevent companies from downloading vast portions of church collections and then repackaging and selling them on their own. Also, it provides an exemption for genealogy libraries from proposals that would require most organizations to obtain permission from all donors of data before offering it over the Internet. Of course, LDS collections have been amassed from the offerings of millions of genealogists. Cannon, R-Utah, negotiated those changes on Thursday to a bill that Howard Coble, chairman of House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Properties, is pushing to tighten rules to make it more difficult for companies to pirate and resell databases. Coble's original wording, however, provided wide exceptions for education and research purposes. Cannon aides said LDS library officials worried that could leave their collections vulnerable, so Coble agreed to changes to protect it. "This bill means that people can access family history information online from all over the world, without the risk of the church losing ownership of the database information," Cannon said. Also, Coble provided exemptions for genealogy libraries to rules he seeks to require obtaining permission from donors of information in databases before distributing it on the Internet. Cannon said, "Because of this exemption, the LDS Family History Library, as well as 3,200 other family history libraries worldwide, will not have to worry about soaring costs and limited selection and availability of information." The action comes just before The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints plans to formally launch its new genealogy Internet site - www.FamilySearch.org - on Monday at a press conference in Salt Lake City and in Washington, D.C., at the National Press Club. Here is the link to the original story: http://www.desnews.com/dn/view/1,1249,100003128,00.html