Robert Scott Horning wrote:
I'd also like to give an example of the typical
licensing terms for most
of these websites:
http://familysearch.org/Eng/policy/FSI_terms.asp
Note especially the clause:
"All material found at this site is owned or licensed by us. You may
view, download, and print material from this site only for your
personal, noncommercial use or, if you are a professional genealogist,
for use by a current client."
It is often unclear just what is copyright in these sites. Most claims
of this sort are self-serving, and legally doubtful. Whether something
is copyright or not has nothing to do with this kind of statement. If I
were to contribute to such a project I would not be granting them
ownership in my information. Facts are not copyrightable, though their
form of organization may be. It all comes down to the status of GEDCOM
files when accepted as a standard.
Compare that to the GFDL, and you will see that most
data has been
signifcantly restricted for re-use in most cases, even if you were the
person who submitted the information in the first place. GFDL (or
Creative Commons type licensing) is one area where sites like what is
being proposed here is going to blow all of the other geneology sites
out of the water.
Have any of these other sites tried taking people to court over
copyright violations? I would be quite prepared to overlook their
copyright claims.
All of these are aspects that are derived from
Wikimedia users'
experience with developing other on-line content. The current internal
push for this sort of development is where users like myself have been
so used to how things are done with Wiki software that we wonder why
this isn't be done for geneological research, where these ideas of free
access to information and the ability to freely edit the information
havn't yet caught on.
Being able to freely edit is an important feature, but that opens up a
wide range of other problems like our policies on original research.
Ec