I've Been Ripped Off! Have You?

I have been ripped off, and so have a number of other genealogy authors. A sharp-eyed newsletter reader passed along a web site address that is in serious violation of copyrights. It seems that Genealogy, Hunt for Ancestors at http://www.targetdates.com is copying articles from this newsletter and other genealogy blogs. The articles are being posted on http://www.targetdates.com without permission of or credit to the original authors. It appears that the owner of Genealogy, Hunt for Ancestors hopes to generate a profit by attracting people to the site and then displaying Google ads to them.

If you write a genealogy blog, you might want to visit http://www.targetdates.com to see if your articles are being republished without permission.

I can't speak for the other genealogy bloggers whose articles are showing up on Genealogy, Hunt for Ancestors. However, I will remind everyone that copyrights apply to all information posted on the web. No one can ever republish articles without permission,  unless the owner specifically states otherwise.

Unlike many bloggers, I do give permission for many of my articles to be republished elsewhere for non-commercial purposes, assuming that certain restrictions are followed. In this case, the restrictions are not being followed.

Here is a copy-and-paste from my copyright statement on http://www.eogn.com, click on "Copyrights":

The contents of this newsletter are copyright by Richard W. Eastman with the following exception:

Many of the articles published in these newsletters contain quotes or references from others, especially from other Web sites, software user's manuals, press releases and other public announcements. Any words in this newsletter attributed to another person or organization remain the copyrighted materials of the original author(s).

This document is provided for informational purposes only. The information contained in this document represents the views of Richard W. Eastman with one exception: words written by other authors and republished herein are the views solely of those authors. All information provided in this document is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied. The reader assumes the entire risk as to the accuracy and the use of this document.

You are hereby granted rights, unless otherwise specified, to re-distribute articles from this newsletter to other parties provided:

1. You do so strictly for non-commercial purposes
2. Articles marked with a Plus Sign (+) are not to be redistributed. Those articles are solely for the use of Plus Edition subscribers.
3. You may not republish any articles containing words attributed to another person or organization until you obtain permission from that person or organization. While you do have permission to republish words written by Richard W. Eastman, you do not have automatic authority to republish words written by others, even if their words appear in this newsletter.

Also, please include the following statement with any articles you re-distribute:

The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2006 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. 

Anyone complying with the above does not need to ask permission in advance.

Permission to use the words in this document for commercial purposes usually is granted. However, commercial use requires advance authorization.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Since Genealogy, Hunt for Ancestors is paid by Google ads, it qualifies as a commercial web site.

Comments

[MJ Mann]

Dick,

Went and looked at the site ... found it interesting that he/she doesn't have the usual 'copyright' statement at the bottom of their page. :v)
In looking through the long column on the left of the page, I did find a section on 'Contributors' which listed:
24-7 Family History Circle Cemeteries

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
EOGN's Other News

Family Research - English, Scottish and Irish Genealogy
Genealogy and How
Genealogy Help
Genealogy News Center
Interment.net
The Genealogue

I bet you didn't realize that you 'contributed' to this site!?! Was this a lame attempt to cover themselves? At least it gives you a hint of where else they stole info ... at least so far.

[Mike]

Sorry about that!! Didn't even realize that what we did was wrong :( We probably should have checked first!
We use Wordpress and a service that feeds our web site. We have removed your rss feed and removed all posts that has anything to do with you and your blog!

[Jennifer]

How about all the other articles that are still posted on the site, all without credit to the original authors? Does Mike have permission to copy those articles without credit to the authors?

[Paul K. Graham]

This is just another "Made for Adsense" site. They pull in lots of RSS feeds from various sites in a given category, which makes their site appear to be unique, but the point is to get visitors to click ads. If you have anything you don't want copied all over the Internet, don't post it on the Internet. I have sites whose content has been copied and published on spam sites. It's annoying, but you can't really do anything about it, just like e-mail spam.

[thehat]

There are two oversights here, maybe: one, Mike should have made it clearer that 'contributors' are in fact RSS news sources. Also, Dick: perhaps your 'small print' should make it clearer (see Google News RSS Ts&Cs for example) that people using your RSS feed should acknowledge the source. Paul Graham's comments are valid. Dick: a lot of your content comes from other people's news sources, so it's not entirely consistent to criticise other people gathering it in this way - though of course I appreciate that you take the time and effort to introduce editorial comment and analysis. I guess there's a fine line to be walked by everyone here. (I'm a genealogy journalist, in case you're wondering!)

[Dick Eastman]

I'll offer one final comment that is a repeat of what I wrote earlier: I DO give permission for many of my articles to be republished elsewhere for non-commercial purposes, assuming that certain restrictions are followed. Mostly, all I ask is that the other person cite the source where the information came from. That was not done in this case.

[Mark]

Speaking of copyright, I've got to ask -- Have you licensed the music you play at the opening of your podcasts?

[Dick Eastman]

I am not a lawyer, but I believe it is legal. It is not a download, is not available at the listener's demand and is a brief clip of a very few seconds. The listener cannot interactively click on and select what music he wants.

If anyone with a background in intellectual property rights has a different opinion, I would love to hear it.

- Dick Eastman

[Lorenzo]

This is interesting - a few years ago there was a lawsuit involving (name deleted) using articles without permission, and allowing downloads. My old library school professor made me aware of it. The service eventually wound up paying me a substantial amount for using my material.

I just wish more people had downloaded, so I could have retired! I didn't mention the actual names so they cannot sue me back. It really happened though and I have the tax return to prove it.

[Mike]

Well, well, well. I never ever even imagined that my site would make such a stir and I didn't even intend to.
In my wildest imagination I thought that "posting" things from other sources like this actually would make this site more popular (even if it maybe not need to!) and that more people would read this and other blogs and the word would be more spread, but I guess I was totally wrong about that.
We do NOT want to do anything illegal so if we have offended anyone by "advertising" their material in a wrongful way we do apologize for that.
We thought, in our innocence, that we could use RSS feeds for our site just to get some content now in the beginning ( site is only a couple of weeks old! but thanks to all the buzz right now it has tons of visitors!) and then go on on our merry way with more original posts about our genealogy search and other stuff (yes, I AM interested in genealogy!)
We do want the site to be a serious actor on the market and help people out in their search for ancestors.
It seems to me that we all need to take a step back and read the laws about copyrights a little bit better, be it music, podcasts, articles or whatever before we even put anything online. We might violate copyrights with anything we write, even it seems original. Someone else might have written it and posted it online and can claim that they put it online before us.

[Kellie]

Lorenzo,

Instead of chirping about how many visitors you're getting now to the site due to your error, you might want to be the one to take a couple of steps back and study up on the copyright laws and, at a minimum, the permissions of those whose work you posted. It's exciting to know that you're "interested" in genealogy, but if you really have an interest, you'll do your homework first and find out about the field before you launch a website. As far as all of us violating copyright with "anything we write"...boy, are you sadly mistaken.

Good luck with your website, but please, please, get a handle on what you're doing before you do it, and be respectful of the writers and bloggers out there. If you do look into this, I think you'll find that it boils down to being polite and asking permission from those who have done the work (see how deliciously copyright and genealogy intertwine?). You may wish one of these days that a certain writer or blogger was your friend, just when you need copy for that website.

[Seumas]

Well, I just set up some RSS feeds on a website I'm building for my local FHS but now I'm thinking is it worth it?
I thought the idea of RSS feed was two-fold in that I could obtain fresh dynamically renewing content of interest from websites that provided such feed & in return, visitors to my site could click on the feed & be taken to the RSS feed providers.
So in effect the RSS feed is really only a "teaser" or advert if you like and doesn't provide the complete article, it can only lead to an increase in traffic in the originating website as you need to click on & open the originating website in order to read the whole article.
Regarding copyright, if I can provide a link to a website without permission then what's the difference with RSS?

I make it clear that the content in the RSS box comes from other websites, but I don't go out of my way to display their copyright info! If visitors to my site click on Eastmans Genealogy Blog, they know whose IP the feed is.
People are becoming more acquainted with RSS and recognise that the content is not the IP of the hosting website but of someone else.
I don't want to rip anybody off, so if you don't want your feed on this new website as is, let me know & I'll pull it down! it's at http://www.tfhsdev.com/new/

[Dick Eastman]

RSS feeds are not an issue. I provide RSS feeds of this newsletter with the expectation and even the hope that these articles will get republished elsewhere. If you read my copyright statement, you will see that I allow and even encourage others to republish most of the articles that I write.

The only issue here is a very old-fashioned one: giving credit where credit is due. There are legal requirements but, in my mind, it is also a matter of being polite. Republishing someone else's articles and making them look like your own work is both in bad taste and also is a violation of various laws.

Yet it is very easy to avoid those issues by simply attributing the source of the article(s). You can see thousands of examples of that all over the web, including quite a few in this newsletter.

- Dick Eastman

[Mike]

One thing we absolutely didn't want to do is to "rip anybody off" or anything else with our site. We did not want it to look like it was our own posts on the site.
We have a script and in our fantasy we thought that when clicking on the link would take you to the second page where all the info would be displayed and a live link to the original site was going to be displayed. The script didn't work that way and we did try to get it configured in almost any way we could think of but it was either or, display a link to this site or to the original site. It has something to do with a mod rewrite thing and the .htaccess file, they say.
We were actually in the works to do this when this article showed up since http://www.targetdates.com is just a few weeks old (not sure how it was found at all).
Anyway, until we have figured things out we have reverted to a link from the first page so if you click on the title the original site will show up instead of going that second page.
We have had this checked by some people who emailed us and it has been approved so if you guys have an RSS feed you want to have displayed on our site, let us know and we'll be more than happy to display it.

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

Let me start by stating that the web site should have cited Dick as the author of the articles. How different is this than citing our sources in our genealogical research?

Then let me pose the question: How different are the site authors' actions than those of Google? Doesn't Google copy other authors' original work onto their own servers without permission and then display it along with ads to make money? That's what Google is all about.

And on a final note of the opening podcast music: I don't think it matters that it's only a snippet. How many music producers have been sued for 'sampling' others' works and including those samples in their own work. For a small outlay, you can purchase CDs of royalty-free music that you can use any way you want to. This seems like a better way to go.

[Jason Presley]

It's different than what Google does because Google gives credit to the source and links to the original site. This guy was just scraping text off various feeds without any acknowledgement of the sources or links to those sites. It wasn't an effort to promote the other sites since there was no way to see what site it came from.

[Dino (all Dino, All the Time)]

Regardless if providing a link to a web site is giving an author credit, Google still copies entire, copyrighted works (web sites) without the authors' permissions and then uses the copy to make money by selling ad space on their search results pages. Shouldn't the author whose web site link is displayed along with an ad pushing some product or another be entitled to some share of that ad revenue?

[Jason Presley]

Aside from the site cache feature (which doesn't feature any Google Ads), where does Google ever copy entire websites?

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

jason,

I think that you just answered your own question. To provided a 'cached' version they need to copy it. The ads appear on the page of links to those caches. That is also how they do their indexing. This is why they need such a big server farm.

This issue has been a topic of conversation for quite a while among webmasters, but was sort of ignored by the general populace until Google proposed scanning books in so they could search through them. Then they got sued by book publishers, autors' groups, et. al. That project still hasn't seen the light of day yet.

[Jason Presley]

The copying aspect of Google's cache strikes me an a minor concern and is easily prevented by webmasters. Sure, that gets into the whole "why should I have to block Google from caching my site when they didn't ask permission in the first place?" discussion, but cache is the very basis of the whole World Wide Web. If you can't cache it, you can't see it. However, the Google Books (formerly Google Print) program is alive and well at http://books.google.com. For every publisher that balked or sued, there have been many who have embraced the project and profited from it. And in all cases, be it their cache feature, Books, News or Search, Google always gives credit and ultimately drives traffic to the content creators.

[Mike]

Hi again,
We have changed as much as we can on Genealogy, Hunt for Ancestors so now every original post goes to the site and not to our second page, which I think was the problem before.
We wanted to have a link to the original post on that second page but couldn't get it to work. It was either or so for now, until we have figured all the programming out all links go to the original post.
If you, Dick, or anyone else want to submit their posts then we'll be more than happy to include them. Some of you have already allowed us to post their blogs/articles which is great!
Check it out and see if it meets all the criteria now. If not, let us know and we'll change it as much as we can (understand)

[Christine]

Hi all,

Having read through the numerous posts on this subject I am beginning to feel quite sorry for Mike. Yes he made a mistake but it is clear from his correspondence that it was just that - an oversight caused partly by not understanding how the feeds worked and partly through reliance on an outside agency. I think Mike's attitude and willingness to do everything possible to rectify the situation says a lot and we should be giving him support in his venture. Setting up a website is not the easiest thing to do and we have all had to learn (often the hard way) by our mistakes in IT as well as genealogy - particularly in not citing sources in our own research (and yes I realise that is different to giving credit for sources from a copyright perspective).

I for one would like to wish Mike all the best for his site - I'm sure he has learned a valuable lesson and no doubt his site will go on to be a valuable resource.