[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki, wishes to become a wiki project

[Ray Saintonge]

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