My Copyright Infringement
by Mike Goad
I’ve taken my genealogy information off Ancestry.com
and Genealogy.com. Did it today; just a little while ago.
Why?
Because I knew that there was information in the
notes portion of my material that was the original expression of other
people. That means I was infringing upon their copyrights.
There was no consideration of copyright issues when
their info was put in my files. There was no pretense at having put it
there under the principle of fair use. I didn’t have a clue
about copyright when I did it.
With most of what I was infringing, there was also no
source documentation, which, technically, meant that my work plagiarized
the works of others.
Completely unintentional, I assure you.
I wasn’t trying to claim the work as my own.
But, that doesn’t really matter, because those who
came and used the information from my material probably assumed that it
was my information, and, if they were doing good source citation, cited me
as the source if they used it.
So how did the information get into my material and
why did I remove it from the internet? What’s the big deal, any way?
How it got there
When I started out trying to find out about my
ancestry, I didn’t know anything about how to go about finding the
information that I wanted. So, being somewhat familiar with using a
computer, one of the first things that I did was to get a genealogy
program,
Family Tree Maker. I think it was version 3. It was a great help
in getting a lot of information into my database in a short period of
time, especially since the program came with CDs that had pedigrees of
people related to me.
Don’t get me wrong. The Family Tree Maker genealogy
program is a great tool that keeps getting better. It’s just that I
didn’t really know what good genealogy was.
I became a collector of names. I worked to build the
number of “relatives” in my database. I used the FTM’s World Family Tree
CDs to find files that I could import and I exchanged gedcoms with
internet correspondents. I even “typed” pedigrees directly into my
database.
Today, that database has 17,587 individuals, many of
them with at least some of their associated vital statistics, mostly with
minimal or no source citation. (I really hated that WFT citation, mostly
because of the way it estimated dates, and deliberately deleted a large
portion of those citations.)
From the perspective of copyright law, there is no
issue with the 17,587 names and their associated statistics. The names
and the statistics are just facts, or presumed facts. Facts cannot be
protected by copyright, not even facts that are in error, because there is
no original expression, no spark of creativity in a fact.
The rub from copyright law came with the narrative
notes that got sucked up into my file from the files that I imported.
Here’s an example:
the farm adjoining my
great grandfather's… belonged to William Davis. before the war between the
states, Mr. Davis had been a slave owner. there were two particular
slaves, a woman and a man. the woman's name was------now pay attention to
this----; Loweezy Creepeasy Tennessee Clementine Buckingham Magbe Davis.
This is part of a narrative that was in a gedcom file
shared by a distant relative. It got imported by my Family Tree Maker
program into my genealogy database with all of the names, dates and places
that I was collecting.
So what the problem? My relative had shared this
with me, right? I should be able to use the information any way that I
wanted to.
Well that’s only partially correct.
The “information,” in the file, is public domain,
free for anyone to use how ever they want.
The “original expression” is there only for the
reading. I can use the underlying information, the facts, any way that I
please, but most uses of the narrative, other than reading it, are
reserved for the work’s author, who is the owner of the copyright.
That includes publishing the work, or any portion of
it. And that is what I had done. Imbedded in my work, and my collection
of facts, was my distant cousin’s original expression, without his
permission, infringing on his copyright, whether he knew it or not.
Why I took it off
I have no idea how many other instances of
infringement there are in my database. The hardcopy printout of the
material that I took offline would be well over 850 pages.
That’s why I took it offline. Before it goes back
online, if it ever does, all of the infringement will be removed.
What’s the big deal?
I’ve learned a lot about copyright laws since the
days I first got interested in genealogy and since I first went online.
I’ve had a website on copyright for several years now and have read and
written a lot about copyright.
Currently, I am in the process of self-publishing a
series of articles on copyright. So the big deal is that, if I’m going to
write about it, I have to live up to what I’m writing about.
While it’s no defense, I have not posted any material
to the places that I had my database reports in a couple of years, so
there was no “new” infringement. However, the internet, unlike
conventional print media, is a continuous publication. As long as it is
online, someone can open it, download it, and print it out. So the
infringement is continuous.
So why isn’t my excerpt here from my cousin’s
writings a copyright infringement? Because I’m using it as an example in
commentary, which falls under the fair use provision of copyright law.
MpG
7/24/2003 (blog posted
12/28/2005) |
