WHITNEY-L Archives

Archiver > WHITNEY > 2004-05 > 1085165567


From: R R Kyser <>
Subject: Re: data theft
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 13:53:31 -0500
In-Reply-To: <74002498.6E4E01D9.0004E165@aol.com>


Jerry is right about this. You cannot claim mere facts as your own,
even if you've spent your entire life and fortune digging them up when
nobody else has bothered. Only your idiosyncratic expression of those
facts is defensible.

However, there is an old cartographer's trick for getting around this.
Map producers collect, at great expense, objects which are inherently in
the public domain. They don't want some competitor with advanced
xerography at his disposal publishing cut-rate knockoffs based on their
hard work. So to deter the larcenous, they add "fiction" to their
"facts"-- fake mountains, waterways, streets, etc. Those are protected.

So, simply sprinkle your gedcom with false children, homesteads, second
wives, etc. When Ancestry sells any of these, you'll see them in court!

Of course, this defeats the whole purpose of genealogy. But then, so
might stopping an entrepreneur from charging the unwary (or simply
lazy) for information already available free-of-charge on the Internet.

Cheers,
Ron Kyser


On Friday, May 21, 2004, at 11:30 AM, wrote:

> Hi, just to weigh in as a compiler of genealogical data (LOCKE, JONES -
> both with lots of WHITNEYs and other related lines in them) and having
> published a few genealogical books, one cannot "own" facts.
>
> That is, vital dates such as birth, death, marriage, etc., are facts
> available to the public however they are recorded and/or discovered.
>
> Only the form (narrative) in which they are disseminated may be
> protected. Also, "fair use" issues sometimes even cloud the latter.
>
>
> Jerry Harrison
>

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