I sent my standard cease and desist email but first, since they didn’t have any contact info on their site, I had to use WHOIS and lookup the info on the domain name registration.

I basically asked them to cough up $500 via PayPal or take down the post immediately.

Within 30 minutes the post was removed and I received an apology.

Goes to show you the power of being vigilant and using a good cease and desist message.

I really don’t think there is a problem with looking up info for people who don’t have the membership. It isn’t cost effective to get a membership for them if all they want is one or two items, or searching one or two ancestors. There is a referral link to both subscription sites within my webpages and where I have documents posted, cited as being from that site, which is very good advertising for them too. And other than documents, a great deal of genealogical info from Ancestry comes from people posting THEIR information. For years people have sent it in to Ancestry.com and they put it together on a CD & sell it. A lot of times the info isn’t correct but it is a good place to get a lead if you are dealing with brickwalls.

At GW, I think one person was concerned, why I don’t know.

I agree with the comments that the historical information itself is not copyrighted, just the presentation, and the source citation should always be included anyway as a standard of proof and general good practice.

I would also point out that in the case of scanning/downloading an entire page of information for sharing with someone other than the subscriber, it is likely done all the time by professional genealogists in their reports to their clients, with no royalty or commission payment back to their source of the information. Therefore, I do not believe that if you were to do so as an act of kindness (without being paid to do so) that it would violate any copyright laws. Personally, I am willing to do one look-up for an individual who belongs to a mailing list or online group, but any more generosity than that becomes a time-management issue. We all have to make a living, and thankfulness for favors doesn’t pay the mortgage.

It is my humble assumption that the online, paid databases are more interested in protecting themselves from someone presenting the data as their own and making it searchable by others through linking, i.e. many users through one subscription. In addition, I do not believe there is anything available through the paid subscription databases that you cannot find at a library or local government office somewhere. All of the scanned texts on Ancestry.com and scanned newspapers at the Newsbank sites are out of copyright protection. It is the time-saving convenience of access that we pay for.

There are four fair use factors.

1. How much you quote from a source
2. The purpose of the quote, (Critiques and educational use have greater latitude)
3. Does the quotation affect the ability of the creator to market his her work?
4. Is the content of the quotation copyrighted/able.

Facts can not be copyrighted, and most works created by Government also can not be copyrighted.

There is a significant difference between being publicly viewable and being “In the Public Domain.” Public Domain means OUT of copyright protection, publicly accessible means simply viewable by the public.

Just because you can see it, doesn’t mean you can do anything you want with it.

It is a VERY complex subject and research is required to assure you remain in legal bounds when using possible copyrighted content.