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Archiver > WIKI-GENPAGES > 2008-01 > 1200543564


From: "Dallan Quass" <>
Subject: Re: [WIKI-GENPAGES] My Heritage
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:19:24 -0600
In-Reply-To: <ACB255A0-865C-4A3C-8E86-AB661B8C249E@earthlink.net>


Just a late response to an earlier point,

> On the otherhand, if you place your information on a wiki,
> you very definitely give up any "creative rights" to it. But
> that's the nature of a wiki. If what you are trying to do is
> preserve your rights to a certain bit of writing, I would
> think a wiki would be the last place in which you'd want to
> place it. You'd probably be better off placeing it somewhere
> that preserves your rights---which curiously, is what I think
> Ancestry and Rootsweb do. Though in the case of Rootsweb, I
> suspect they really haven't thought things through very well.

Technically, in a wiki you retain the copyright to the text that you have
added to the page, and you agree to an "open-content" license that says that
others can use your copyrighted text. After several people have edited a
page it becomes very difficult to determine who has copyright on what
portions of the page, but that's ok because everyone has have agreed to the
license their material under the same license. The actual license varies
from wiki to wiki, but it often includes two points:

(1) If you distribute information you obtained from the wiki you are
obligated to acknowledge where you got that information from. This is
usually done by including a link back to the wiki page.

(2) If you create a "derivative work" based upon information you obtained
from the wiki, you are obligated to make your derivative work available
under the same license.

I could be wrong on this, but the last time I checked I believe that when
you upload information to either Ancestry or RootsWeb, you keep whatever
copyright you have on that information, but you give The Generations Network
(owner of both Ancestry and RootsWeb) a license to use your information
however they choose.

So in either case you retain copyright to the information you post. The
basic difference is that if you post information to a commercial
organization you're generally giving that one organization a license to use
your information, whereas if you post it to a wiki you're giving _everyone_
a license to use (and build upon) your information.

One thing about a wiki is that it's generally easy to update it, so at least
you don't have the problem of not being able to update a tree that you had
previously posted with bad information. It also encourages others to update
it, so they're hopefully more likely to join you in editing it and less
likely to copy your information into their local tree and not communicate
with you.

--dallan
http://www.werelate.org/wiki/User:Dallan

P.S., copyright and license only apply to information that is copyrightable.
Raw facts are not copyrightable, and a collection of facts is copyrightable
only to the extent that "creativity" was used in determining which facts to
include in the collection. To my knowledge it's never been determined
conclusively whether the collection of facts in a GEDCOM is copyrightable,
but the textual information in the notes certainly is.

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