TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 2005-12 > 1135822302


From: Lee Hoffman <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] Printing and Privacy
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 21:12:02 -0500
References: <87.3585eed5.30e3f87d@aol.com>
In-Reply-To: <87.3585eed5.30e3f87d@aol.com>


wrote:
>I have suffered from the unauthorised publication by third parties of my
>private genealogical research and my sources on commercial
>genealogy websites.
>Material published included private correspondence to me, my comments on
>evidence, my e-mail address and surnames of living people in Britain and in
>Germany who had asked me for professional and political reasons not to make
>public their Jewish ancestry.
>The source of this material was a GEDCOM which I gave in good faith to a
>person attempting to trace and reunite families split in the Holocaust.
>Without
>my permission this person passed my GEDCOM to other people who have chosen
>to
>add it to their own trees and to upload it onto public genealogy websites.
>A few years ago I took steps to have this material removed. And my efforts
>were successful.
>Now another person or persons has again published this private GEDCOM file
>on the internet on several sites and has not been persuaded to remove it. He
>protested that it was too much trouble.

First, the above does not relate to the above subject of "printing and
privacy" although it may be a parallel issue. You "gave" the data to a
third party and that third party has caused or allowed it to be
published. You may or may not have told the third party that it should not
be published but there is not much you can do if the data was not covered
by a copyright and probably not much if it was unless the publication was
in exactly the form that you distributed (the GEDCOM file).

I had much the same thing happen to me some 15 years ago. In my case, the
third-party person turned out to be the commercial company who tried to
sell me my own information. The ironic part of this is that I had been
looking at his advertisements and was considering buying some stuff from
him. Like you I no longer give anyone a GEDCOM of my data. Instead I
produce a report from TMG and send that. Of they then want to sell it in a
useful form such as GEDCOM then they have to do some work keying it into a
program.


Lee Hoffman/KY
TMG Tips: <http://www.tmgtips.com>;
My website: <http://www.tmgtips.com/lhoffman>;
A user of the best genealogy program, The Master Genealogist (TMG)


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