Full-sized images removed from other website
There’s been some progress over the past few days in resolving the appropriation of images from the FindAGrave.com website by an upstart website called PeopleLegacy.
Billing itself as “one of the largest online repositories for cemetery and grave records from all available historical sources,” PeopleLegacy launched last week into a firestorm of public criticism for what clearly appears to have been wholesale appropriation of user-uploaded images and information from FindAGrave.com.
Full-sized copies of images from FindAGrave appeared on the PeopleLegacy website overwritten with a watermark from PeopleLegacy. The vast majority of the images are copyrighted images, with the copyright owned by individual contributors to FindAGrave. Many others, perhaps not copyright protected, were family photographs that had been uploaded to the FindAGrave site by individuals as well.
Not surprisingly, those who had uploaded to FindAGrave were outraged. On Facebook, elsewhere in social media, in emails, and even in comments to this blog, FindAGrave users wanted to know one thing: could this appropriation of their images be legal? And, if not, what could be done about it?1
As reported here last Friday, there were problems in trying to contact or deal with the PeopleLegacy website. There is no site owner identified on the website; it’s apparently hosted or its owner claims to be located in Cyprus, but the associated phone number is out of Florida.2 Registration information for the website only identified the registrar, and not the hosting company, and it’s generally the hosting company with which a takedown notice needs to be filed under the Digital Millennium copyright act (DMCA).
The opinion of The Legal Genealogist then and now is that it sure looked to be a copyright violation as to every contributor of original photos to FindAGrave as well as the compilation copyright of FindAGrave.com, now an Ancestry property.
The official statement from Ancestry at the time was: “Ancestry recently learned about PeopleLegacy.com, which appears to improperly feature user-submitted copyrighted material that was sourced on Ancestry’s FindAGrave website. We take this issue seriously and will take the necessary action.” The same statement appeared in the News and Announcements section of the FindAGrave.com website with a note, “When more information becomes available, we will post it here on the FindAGrave News blog.”3
Nothing more has been said, but there has been some action as PeopleLegacy appears to be responding to pressure from Ancestry.
Over the past few days, the full-sized copyrighted images – clearly appropriated from the FindAGrave.com website – have been removed from PeopleLegacy.com. A search on that website now does produce thumbnail-sized copies of the FindAGrave.com images, still bearing the PeopleLegacy watermark, when searching for an individual grave (as with my own grandfather’s grave, above). All other copies of the images now appear to be gone from the PeopleLegacy site.
This is a start –- not a complete solution –- to the appropriation of user images. Even the thumbnail-sized copies, as unauthorized copies of copyrighted images, should not appear on the PeopleLegacy site. Unlike the use of thumbnails on sites like Google Image Search or Bing Image Search, these thumbnails do not lead back to the originals; they’ve simply been appropriated by one website from another for its own use.
Removing all of the appropriated images, regardless of size, unless explicit permission is granted by the uploader is the only legally and ethically acceptable outcome.
Now… What about the factual information that is also clearly lifted from the FindAGrave.com website? That’s a tougher situation, because facts simply cannot be copyrighted. Only the way the facts are presented -– if there is some creative spark in the organization or presentation or just the way they been written up -– can be copyrighted.4
It may seem — and may well be — ethically wrong to simply appropriate months and years of someone else’s work in assembling factual information to use it on your own website.5 It certainly violates every ethical norm in the genealogical community.6 But at least in the United States, there isn’t legal protection for purely factual information.
So don’t expect too much when it comes to anything other than the photos that have been appropriated here.
For the moment, there’s nothing more to be done by individuals whose photos and work have been appropriated by PeopleLegacy. It remains in Ancestry’s hands to protect the copyrights and user-contributed information of its own property, FindAGrave.com.
We’ll continue to monitor the situation and let you know if anything changes. For now, the right thing to do remains to let Ancestry’s legal team take the lead.
Stand by.
SOURCES
- See e.g. Dick Eastman, “No, Find-A-Grave Wasn’t Exactly ‘Hacked,’” Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, posted 21 Sep 2018 (https://blog.eogn.com/ : accessed 24 Sep 2018), and the comments to that post. ↩
- See the note at the end of Judy G. Russell, “America’s first daily,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 21 Sep 2018 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 24 Sep 2018). ↩
- See “Taking action on improper use of material from Find A Grave,” Find A Grave News & Announcements, posted 21 Sep 2018 (https://news.findagrave.com/ : accessed 24 Sep 2018). ↩
- See “FAQs: What Does Copyright Protect?,” Copyright.gov (https://www.copyright.gov/ : accessed 24 Sep 2018) (“Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed”). ↩
- I do note some irony here since many FindAGrave contributors uploaded information they had appropriated from cemetery books produced at great effort and expense by genealogical societies… ↩
- See e.g. Guidelines for Sharing Information with Others, National Genealogical Society (https://www.ngsgenealogy.org/ : accessed 24 Sep 2018) (“genealogists and family historians consistently … observe meticulously the legal rights of copyright owners, copying or distributing any part of their works only with their permission”). ↩
Finding who hosts peoplelegacy.com is easy:
$ Argus:k-mac-integration-2.1.2> host peoplelegacy.com
peoplelegacy.com has address 35.168.100.186
peoplelegacy.com mail is handled by 10 peoplelegacy.com.
$ Argus:k-mac-integration-2.1.2> host 35.168.100.186
186.100.168.35.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ec2-35-168-100-186.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
That’s an Amazon Web Services instance, so DMCA takedowns should follow the procedure here:
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/submit-dmca-notice/
At this point, it’s better to let Ancestry’s legal team handle it. If it fails, then a raft of DMCA takedown notices may be needed.
soo Ancestry can immediately act on the threat to Find-A-Grave, but they drag their feet on fully restoring Rootsweb?!?! (13 months and counting due to the data breach there.. That’s BS. Total Bs
I checked several of the photos I uploaded as well as original text written about the individuals, not just dates and locations. It appears that they have deleted selected data such as birth dates and locations. In one case, they have deleted the family members that had been listed with the deceased. Perhaps, this is a pathetic attempt to disguise their activities.
Pillaging took place BEFORE 15 March 2018. This much I know because of certain memorials I made on this date did not show up in that infidel place. Data from before 15 March 2018, all the ones I checked, completely stripped of photos.
Not stripped are the photos of entrances of cemeteries.
You have to wonder why someone would go to the trouble to create yet another free grave record site. We already have Find a Grave, Billion Graves, plus others such as the Iowa Gravestone Photo Project. Are they hoping to make money by selling their site to some big company? If they are copying entries from Find a Grave and then stripping out some of the data they are just making a confused mess. Hopefully the bad publicity will discourage people from contributing to their site.
I did a quick check at this site and found they are still using thumbnail photo for my dad (and presumably all the others I posted) that I uploaded to FAG but when you click through it’s just general info – https://peoplelegacy.com/ng/search?fname=Robert&lname=Follett&state=ND&city=Fargo
People – including ancestry.com – have been using my data and work for many years, because early on I uploaded all my research notes in my gedcom to worldconnect with the usual names and dates gedcom data. (And I had genealogy photos on my genealogy website, FAG, and Flickr.) Then I saw my research notes would appear cut and pasted whole cloth all over the place. And photos I had uploaded online to my website or to FAG have also been liberally “stolen” and used as well, including at ancestry or its affiliates. I have been asked to pay for services to view or access my own photos many times!! I know these are my photos because I always did Photoshop work on the photos to clean them up and there is no doubt – they did not come from an independent source. They are my retouched photos. – But anyway, this happens in genealogy, we all want to put the info out there for others to benefit from in their own searches. – I also have seen that mistakes in my data early on got reprinted over and over again in other people’s work, and because so many people copied it, it seemed to become known as “the truth.” All the cut and pasting used to really piss me off, but now I realize it is human nature, many people don’t want to do their own research if it’s put out there by some dumb bunny like me. And many people quite simply don’t know how to do research. All I can do is correct my data when I can, clean up my sources, and accept that my text and images will be copied, cut and pasted, despite any CR notices. The alternative would be endless litigation that I am simply not up for trying to pursue. And I really don’t care that much if individual persons interested in genealogy benefit from my work. (But it would be nice to be credited at least!!) I know I will never make money from my genealogy work anyway.
– – – But the bottom line is that no Company should be stealing another website and simply reposting in their own style. That’s pretty sleazy.
>> the bottom line is that no Company should be stealing another website and simply reposting in their own style. That’s pretty sleazy. << Worth repeating.
Regarding the posting of “facts”, I believe the relevant precedent is a case involving the “Yellow Pages” phone directory of yore, from back in the days when these were big heavy volumes delivered to residences. Others took the information from them and created their own directories; for example, local directories for a neighborhood. I believe the court decision ruled that this was permissible, because (as you said) facts cannot be copyrighted. I’m not a lawyer, and I can’t cite chapter and verse, but somehow the above sticks in my head from long ago.
The case you’re thinking of is Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).
And I heard that the publishers of telephone books started putting fictitious names in the books so they could tell who was stealing their work.
It was rumored that the people who published the Hagstrom’s road atlases, famous for for their incredible level of large-scale detail, used to occasionally insert a non-existent street or alley on their maps to catch infringers who simply copied Hagstrom’s instead of doing their own groundwork and making their own maps.
For sure that happened . There is a place in southern NY state which does not exist and appears on some “appropriated” maps. They are called paper towns.
Right clicking the thumbnail, copying the image url, then feeding that into your search box? Brings up the full-sized image. I had to laugh when a photo I took came up with my watermark still showing under theirs.
That’s different than displaying it full-sized, but it doesn’t matter: it’s wrongful appropriation whether it’s a full-sized image or not.
What do you make of their actions in light of the Find A Grave terms and conditions? Haven’t they misappropriated intellectual property protected via contract law?
Personally, I think it’s so clearly a violation of the terms of service that, if I were Ancestry, I’d go after them. But — alas — I don’t run the circus.
And people wonder why I don’t put all my stuff online.
PeopleLegacy’s blatant rip-off of Find A Grave makes little sense, unless it is some form of a honey pot trap. I suggest staying far away from that site.
So what is your opinion on find a grave user’s whole sale copying from roots web and usgenweb cemetery indexes without citing the original source and instead claiming as their own and ancestrys repeated lack of removal or response when complaints were filed?
See footnote 5.
Since I have put pictures of grave stones on Find a Grave for requested graves I don’t care what others use them for. My “research” is only taking the picture and down loading to the site.My only hope is that it remains a free site.
PeopleLegacy isn’t just doing this to Find-A-Grave, the site includes photos founds on Legacy,com which hosts funeral/death notices from funeral homes.