* Kent Family History Society (KFHS) copyright breach!

[themoudie]

FHUG members,

This post is just to make you aware of potential copyright breaches by FindaGrave/Ancestry on their websites.

I copy, verbatum, from the KFHS, Kent FHS Supplement (Issue 11 Spring 2023), the Societies current position, of which I am a memeber, on this breach, below:

"A few months ago, a major breach of the KFHS copyright was uncovered with almost 181,000 records, mainly burials in the Medway Towns and Sheerness, uploaded to FindaGrave.com (owned by Ancestry) without our permission. Although Ancestry have accepted that this was a breach of copyright, at the time of writing they have not removed the records from the website despite reminders. Other Societies have been advised to check whether their copyright has also been breached. KFHS is considering whether further action can be taken which is within the financial means of the Society. Members are invited to offer suggestions and to report any examples that they may find during their research. The records will have no photograph just a date, grave reference and other information taken from our transcript and the source will be “woowoo”.

Please be aware that the Ancestry brand may not be the "Snow White" company that it purports to be and that your information may no longer be yours alone! You will note that the cost of litigation against Ancestry is likely to be the deciding factor in whether a case is raised, or whether anything practical can be done about this breach of copyright.

Good health to you all, BillR

[ADC65]

I have noticed a marked increase of entries on Find A Grave which are clearly mass uploads from other sources, rather than the mainly user-generated content it used to have. Quite honestly, I'm not interested in unsubstantiated material without a photo, and in my opinion it has reduced the usefulness of the site considerably. It also irks me that user-generated sites like Find A Grave and other then sell out to companies like Ancestry, when it is ordinary Joe Bloggs who has created the content for them but get none of the reward from the sale.

To be fair to Ancestry, their copyright notice has always been unequivocal:

By submitting User Provided Content through any of the Services, you grant Ancestry a perpetual, sublicensable, worldwide, non-revocable, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, publish, distribute, provide access to, create derivative works of, and otherwise use such User Provided Content to the extent and in the form or context we deem appropriate on or through any media or medium and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed or discovered. This includes the right for Ancestry to copy, display, and index your User Provided Content. Ancestry will own the indexes it creates.

Note that the copyright still stays with the content owner, but by uploading anything to Ancestry you have given them the permission to do (royalty free) whatever they want with it.

In the now-familiar whine of social media excuses, Ancestry in their copyright statement say:

Please remember that we are only the distributor of user supplied content and the submitter, not Ancestry, is the one who has violated copyright if such a violation has occurred. However, we will respond to substantiated claims of violation.

This is the sort of excuse Facebook, Twitter et al give for not moderating their platforms effectively. "Not out fault, guv." It's clearly pathetic but it makes legal claims tricky I would have thought.

[Mark1834]

An excellent reminder, Bill, thank you.

I use the Kent FHS databases extensively (accessed via FMP), and I always record the FHS as the author and FMP as the repository. I ignore parallel listings on other databases, and am particularly wary of FaG, as it seems to hoover up a lot of duplicate data from other sources.

I never upload detailed citations, as I’m adverse to donating data to Ancestry that belongs to other people (“you keep the copyright but we give ourselves the right to use it as we see fit” is probably a reasonable summary of their small print).

The point regarding enforcement is well made. My ex-employer was one of Europe’s largest companies, but even they were wary of taking on a US-based company in the American courts, as their US attorneys admitted the system had an in-built bias (probably subconscious) against foreign organizations. That might go a long way to explain why links to the large US databases are dominated by US companies (FTM and RM), while CP have agreements with FindMyPast (UK) and My Heritage (Israel) - it’s just not worth getting involved with US contracts and legal systems.

[NickWalker]

There have been a number of times with Find A Grave where I've found an entry for an ancestor and excitedly thought this must mean they have a grave in the church yard, only to later realise this is just someone uploading burial records from the parish register. Yes this means they were buried there, but there's no grave stone and probably in many cases there never was - I expect most of my ancestors may just had a wooden cross marking the grave that rotted away within a few years.

[Mark1834]

I’ve been rummaging around on the FaG website, and they certainly play up the community involvement and play down the fact they have been wholly owned by Ancestry for 10 years. It’s in the “about” history, but the real giveaway is when you click on the legal small print at the bottom, and it goes straight to Ancestry corporate documentation!

[ADC65]

Has it been ten years! That is a surprise. You're right that it's kept its own brand identity and they play on the community spirit thing. In my experience it's been the last year or so that a lot of extraneous information seems to have flooded in, but maybe I've just been searching more. As Nick says, it's disappointing when you find a hit just to find it's a text entry from a register, especially if that can be found elsewhere.

[AdrianBruce]

There have been a number of times with Find A Grave where I've found an entry for an ancestor ... only to later realise this is just someone uploading burial records from the parish register. Yes this means they were buried there, but there's no grave stone ...

Yeah. What don't they understand about "Find A Grave"? Not to mention the other data that has zero to do with the grave but has been plucked from a tree. Like others here, I'm really happy to use the photo of a headstone - but that's it.

Well, almost....

Being fair to FaG (why? Well, because...) I found the burial records (apparently) of my Great Great Aunt in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since she was how I got into Family History, I wondered if I could get a photo of her grave - except there was no plot number. I managed to use the FaG stuff to get in contact with the cemetery in question, who were very good to me. Turns out that she wasn't buried there but the reason that the data had been loaded into FaG was that the cemetery had bought out the undertakers in question so as well as loading the cemetery records, they'd loaded the undertakers' records as well. In that case, there was no other access to the undertakers' records (at least, not at that time) so one shouldn't dismiss non photographic information on FaG - that's as flawed as automatically believing it. (Turned out that GG Aunt died in California but was buried in Connecticut - I suspect that she'd provided for her afterlife while still living in New York but then retired to the opposite side of the country).

[ShaunWilson]

the source will be “woowoo”.

I presume that means the user account that has uploaded the info is "woowoo"? I have seen other users scrape websites (like my local government cemetery website) and upload the data to boost their score. It may be easier to sue the user, which could then compel Ancestry to remove the data. Ancestry/FindAGrave may or may not be willing to provide the user data, but the KFHS should be able to detect such a user (scraping bot) through their internet logs, and perhaps they can engage the user through that avenue. It is possible that the user used a proxy server though, making this task harder than it seems.

So yes, legal pursuits may be more trouble than they are worth. Instead perhaps KFHS can reach a beneficial agreement with Ancestry/FindAGrave. They could have the records transferred to a KFHS branded account, with proper attribution and source links added, and perhaps Ancestry could make a yearly financial contribution to KFHS?!

[BrendaP]

Unfortunately Kent FHS do not know the identity of woowoo, or have any way of contacting him. If anything more than just the screenname he's hiding behind was known further action could be taken.

[LeslieP]

I love nothing more than getting distracted by a novel concept/problem and learning about how jerks turn nice things into steaming piles of garbage. So, obviously, I had to look into this. It had never occurred to me that people would do this.

Found a classic of the genre - no image, not much to go on
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/245 ... am-unknown

Contributor is "Anonymous" - so helpful
https://www.findagrave.com/user/profile/48761667

Anonymous is following one person: "Athanatos" - basically anonymous, but ok, I'll look.
https://www.findagrave.com/user/profile/46907585

screenshot_20230207_120813.png (14.57 KiB) Viewed 3623 times

WOW!

There's ZERO possibility that Athanatos shares the values of the original creator of FindAGrave, or that the person or organization running that account is any kind of normal person interested in family history.

I just do not understand people - is there some profit in this? What is the purpose?

The result is to turn FindAGrave into a garbage site, when it's always been a nice place to look for clues (like FamilySearch, it's a place for clues, a pointer to find sources, not a quality source in itself, that's ok, we NEED these places for clues).

It's so sad. But even more than that - it's confusing. I don't understand the reasoning behind creating a milllion profiles.

[kfunk_ia]

I am a little late to the discussion, but I am curious as to what material is violating copyright. It seems as if some posts think that the data itself violates copyright. That is not the case. The only possible copyright violations would be any photos that were posted on the KFHS site. The birth/death/inscriptions would not be copyrightable in the Unites States and being that Amazon is headquartered here, that is most likely where litigation would have to take place and the laws that would be used, if push came to shove.

If it is indeed the photos then Ancestry could/should take them down however that is going to require the actual copyright holders to file DMRC claims. Usually this means whoever took the photo to start with. KFHS wouldn't have the ability to file those claims unless the original photo owner assigned or license their rights to KFHS.

[ColeValleyGirl]

As you say, facts cannot be copyrighted, but there may be a breach of the contractual terms under which KFHS made the material available.

[Gary_G]

Large companies seem to grow by buying up, or possibly pirating, others data. That really bothers me. So; I tend to "vote with my feet" when it comes to companies like Ancestry, who are more about making money than true genealogical research. Much of what is on Ancestry is actually on other free sites as well. The French departmental records are an excellent example and the Library and Archives of Canada is another.

So; when one sees this type of "grab" by a company, I'd urge people to look for the original source and use it instead. The companies will eventually get the message and one immediately gets unadulterated information at a much reduced cost (if any cost at all).

[kfunk_ia]

As you say, facts cannot be copyrighted, but there may be a breach of the contractual terms under which KFHS made the material available.

Unfortunately KFHS is highly unlikely to be able to prove any breach like that if the information is available from any place outside of their control. If there was bio information that was only available from KFHS and it was copied verbatim, then maybe they could make a case. By bio information, I am talking about the stuff that normally appears in an FaG bio section. Things such as dates of birth and death, and even spouses and children would reasonably exist outside the scope of the KFHS database. Anyone that reposted bio data straight from the KFHS database, verbatim, would deserved to be smacked soundly about the head and shoulders.

[fhtess65]

Helen is correct. I imagine this is less about "copyright" but more about breaching the terms of a licensing agreement.

As you say, facts cannot be copyrighted, but there may be a breach of the contractual terms under which KFHS made the material available.

[AdrianBruce]

... I imagine this is less about "copyright" but more about breaching the terms of a licensing agreement. ...

Part of the quote in the first post said:

The records will have no photograph just a date, grave reference and other information taken from our transcript and the source will be “woowoo”.

So that sounds like it's a set of transcripts belonging to KFHS that have been copied. I think that in the UK (and EU) this comes under the heading of Database Copyright (https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/g ... the-basics). I'm even more hazy on the US equivalent, but there is something there - see https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html.

Having said all that, I'm really just guessing because IANAL....