Copyright Matters

What's on the Internet is not yours for the taking! It's copyrighted. Ask, before you take. Read Terry's article entitled Meum et teum . . . MINE and THINE!

End of Saga

Ancestry.com claims the removal of the Internet Biographical Collection is permanent. They've apologized to Janice for stealing from her blog. It's time to move on to other topics. They will be there with some great materials for researchers willing to pay the price. They have competition which will hopefully also continue to bring new resources to researchers. I just hope that none of them will again "lift data" and repackage it. I have no objection to search engines which link to the original data, but copying the data without permission is another matter entirely. I applaud Ancestry.com's decision to permanently remove the collection.

Ancestry.com Infuriates Webmasters and Bloggers

Ancestry.com is harvesting data from many websites and blogs and putting them in their Internet Biographical Collection. When the collection first began showing up, it was a paid premium site (for what was posted freely on the Web elsewhere).

You can keep up with the controversy at AnceStories, CowHampshire, or GeneaMusings. [These links are to specific posts, but I'm sure you can keep up with the controversy at these and other genealogy blogs by going to the main blog.]

There are some historical and genealogical societies and some USGenWeb county sites which may be removing their data from the Rootsweb pages because of this. Rootsweb is owned by Ancestry.com's parent company The Generations Network.

Update (8/29): They've removed the collection for now.