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Subject: Re: Ang: genealogy copyright's
Author: Donald Fritze
Date: Thursday, March 12, 2015
Classification: Query
Surnames:

Well, the facts I present are available elsewhere so there is no new data to present. My data should not be valuable because none of the family data can be copyrighted. It's all facts presented as facts. "the more data" cannot include my data which has been obtained from online sources and so is not created by me nor by them; no copyright can be claimed or made.

Now, I believe people pay for Ancestry.com because there are indexes, not of census records which are available in several places, but indexes of other material such as military service records, immigration and naturalization records, passports, city directories, and other material. Census is easy. City directories are not; you have to have the original to look anything up unless someone has made an index. If you read the fine print, There's a lot of work being done by Ancestry.com Operations, Inc. and I think people value the effort enough to pay for it. People also pay for the census images which can be copyrighted by The Generations Network because they are enhanced images of public domain images of public domain documents. The creativity in enhancing the images is what can be copyrighted and has been.

As for Broderbund, I don't think any actual court case would go very well for them. There are penalties for asserting copyright when there is no rightful claim.
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