Genealogy and Copyright Laws

There are hundreds and thousands of people in the world that gather family genealogy every day. Web sites come and go e-mails fly probably faster than the speed of light. But what about your information that was hard earned and time spent, where does it go? Right into other peoples information that they claim is there's.

So what is a person to do to protect their information so other people can't steel it? Lots of people wonder this every day. They ask should I copyright my information? Is my information automatically under copyright when I publish it? Do you think I should keep my information a secret or should I publish it for all to see? I'm not publishing my information because there is so much inaccurate information out there! These are hard question to answer.

The first thing that anyone that lives in the United States have to realize is that facts are not protected by copyright laws. Most of the information a genealogist gathers is basted on facts. Facts are in the public domain.

You might be able to claim copyright on the arrangement of those facts and you might be able to claim copyright on a compiled collection of facts; but every individual fact still remains in the public domain.

So what exactly is your information considered? The genealogy information that you have collected consists of a collection of facts. Now remember, facts are not "owned" or copyrighted by anyone. So you really don't own your information. Most of your genealogy information was obtained from a public source like, birth, marriage and death records, census records, military pensions, and more. These are all in the public domain and are available to others, if they wish to look.

You can in know way consider your information you have gathered "my private information." You have simply transcribed the information that is already out there for the public. You have just copied the information for your personal use, the same way anyone else can do by spending their time and effort, like you did finding the original records. Therefore, it is not "my" information; it is everyone's public domain information that you happen to transcribe.

You will run across a few cases that you can supplement the public facts with more information that you obtained from family members or other non-public sources, but the U.S. laws still stand. The facts cannot be copyrighted.

You need to interpret this to mean that facts are facts, regardless of where the information came from or what the information is. If you obtain information from your cousin or from a family bible, it is still a fact and is not "my" private bit of information.

If you think of keeping your information a secret, think again. As I have already said, the facts are mostly public already. Most facts are readily available for the public viewing, birth, marriage, death records, census records and so on. You cannot keep these a secret or protect them from the public. These are public records on deceased people and there is no reason to protect these records. You never want to publish information about a living person; so whether you publish your information online or not, your really are not keeping secrets or protecting anyone.

Now if you are one of those that won't even consider publishing your information because there is so much out there that is wrong and your don't trust people. You might consider it this way.

No genealogy information is set in stone. One person can back up there finding with a certain document and another can come along with some other kind of document and challenge you. This is what genealogy is all about; challenges in seeking the true. If you know you have the correct information, publicizing it will out way the inaccurate information.

If you have a collection of family stories, you rewrite them in narrative form; you may be able to claim copyright and "ownership" of those stories. But remember that story will exclude any facts in the copyright. Facts are still facts and are not protected by copyright in the United States.

So this is basically a catch 22. Facts are not copyrighted. There open to the public domain. You can't claim ownership, but you can work on getting the right information out there with the right facts to back the information up.