What if my neighbor wants to look up her grandfather on my Family Archive CD?
Can I use a Family Archive CD to answer a search request on an electronic bulletin board?
No. It is not Fair Use to "rent" your Family Archives. Such use, especially if you publicize an offer, is a violation of Fair Use because it harms our potential market. You may, however, charge people a fee for your research services if you look up information for them on your Family Archive CD. That's because you add your own value to the information. Still, the information you deliver to your clients should not be copied electronically off the Family Archive CD (as a screen download or printout), because that requires no expertise, takes only mechanical effort, and does not add any value to the copyrighted work. Instead, you would want to deliver the information in the form of a pedigree tree, for example. Asking someone to pay for a screen download is so similar to renting your Family Archive CD that it's not considered Fair Use.
That's fine. Your neighbor has a specific person in mind, and she'll only be using a tiny portion of the data from your Family Archive. If she later buys a different Family Archive of her own, hopefully she'll return the favor and let you do a search or two!
No. Posting the results of a broad search onto an electronic bulletin board is always a violation of copyright, because the information is projected to a large number of people. On the other hand, if you and another specific person want to use e-mail to communicate with each other, it's fine to share small quantities of specific data from your Family Archive CD. As long as your messages aren't being broadcast to an entire bulletin board community, e-mail can be a real time-saver for checking and finding family history facts quickly.
Because your family tree will be included on a CD that will be available for purchase, you should be sure that it does not invade the copyrights of anyone who was a source for your information. That is, your use of any source should be within the realm of "Acceptable Use:"
If your family tree contains every part of a family tree that is documented and researched in a family history book, you should not contribute it unless you have the approval (in writing) of the author of the family history. (Usually a copyright expires 50 or 70 years after the death of the author, depending on the type of publication, so some family history books may no longer be copyrighted. However, copyrights can be renewed, so it is best to check on a case-by-case basis.) However, if you used only a portion of the family history (or any other source), there should be no problem and you can feel comfortable contributing your family tree to the World Family Tree.
|
|||||||||||||||
| © 2009 Ancestry.com |