Can you imagine doing genealogical research and only being able to find images at paid subscription sites like Ancestry.com? Or not being able to share images you find for fear of having a $30,000 claim filed against you? Or not being able to share memes, images, and videos on social media sites like Instagram and Twitter?
That is the future facing genealogists and anyone else who shares content online if the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) bill is passed by Congress. The House of Representatives already passed it on 22 Oct 2019 by a vote of 410 to 6. The Senate is the only thing standing between this bad piece of legislation and an unsuspecting public. If you’re a US voter, please contact your senators and ask them to oppose or modify this bill. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has made it easy to do so.
Images and text are the most important genealogy tools. There are images of records, books, newspaper articles, grave markers, people, and places that we all use, as well as text from these sources. On this blog we also use images of screenshots from applications. While we always try to credit images we use from other sources, as good genealogists should, there’s always the chance we may have improperly and inadvertently used someone else’s copyrighted work. Any decent copyright owner would simply send us a takedown notice, but not everyone is decent in this world. There are people known as copyright trolls who deliberately post photos to sites like Flickr and then send demands for payment to people who violate the copyright or fail to attribute them properly. An article at the TidBits website explains the problem in detail, as does the EFF at the link above; I encourage you to read those articles to learn how you might be impacted if the CASE bill becomes law.
I will close with a few tips and reminders about sharing content you don’t own online (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer).
- Educate yourself about what you may and may not share online. There are many resources, but here are a few that I bookmarked for myself:
- If you share content that isn’t yours, attribute it properly, to include any Creative Commons attributions
- If necessary (usually for commercial purposes), get permission to share or reuse content
- When in doubt, do not share
If you have any other tips or experiences with copyright issues, please share them in the comments.
Thanks, I will pass on to my USA family and hope they will action.
I’m not sure what the position is in the UK or if this kind of USA legislation affects us, but I know the EU (which we are still part of!!!) often try to enforce draconian rules.
“I know the EU (which we are still part of!!!) often try to enforce draconian rules.”
However, they are democratic unlike our present / late departed conservative government that bases its ‘democracy’ on that of North Korea.