… the swiped photos are gone from PeopleLegacy
The debacle over the wholesale swiping of copyrighted photographs from Find A Grave by an upstart website called PeopleLegacy has sure taken some interesting twists.
The problem began back in mid-September when — billing itself as “one of the largest online repositories for cemetery and grave records from all available historical sources” — PeopleLegacy launched into a firestorm of public criticism: clearly it had indulged itself in wholesale appropriation of user-uploaded images and information from FindAGrave.com.
Full-sized copies of images from Find A Grave appeared on the PeopleLegacy website overwritten with a watermark from PeopleLegacy. The vast majority of the images were copyrighted images, with the copyright owned by individual contributors to Find A Grave. Many others, perhaps not copyright protected, were family photographs that had been uploaded to the FindAGrave site by individuals as well.1
The copyright owners and uploaders were Not Amused. Neither was Ancestry, which now owns the Find A Grave website. The company said at the time: “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.”2
Those full-sized images had been removed by the end of September, but smaller versions of the images still appeared, still with the watermark.
As of yesterday, when The Legal Genealogist checked the PeopleLegacy website, the full-sized photos were still gone, but the smaller images were still there — and the website had conceded that the photographs it swiped were copyrighted by the photographers. Case in point: my own photograph, taken at the request of a family member, of the tombstone of Amy Schoolcraft at the Knotts Cemetery in Calhoun County, West Virginia, appeared with a note: “Copyright by JG Russell.”
And… sigh … another watermark for something called Wiki Heritage.
Which, as far as anyone can determine, doesn’t exist except in the mind of whoever (or whatever) is behind the PeopleLegacy website.
Ancestry was still Not Amused. Its statement when I reached out yesterday: “PeopleLegacy.com appears to display material that was originally submitted by users to our FindAGrave.com website. We neither shared nor approved the display of any content on the third-party site. We take this issue seriously and have requested that PeopleLegacy immediately remove any and all FindAGrave.com content from its site, and cease and desist from any similar activities in the future.”3
And at 10 a.m. EDT, when I sat down to finish this blog post and went over to PeopleLegacy to check one more time…
The photos are gone.
All of them.
There’s no photo on the initial search results page for Amy Schoolcraft:
There’s no photo on the individual search page for her burial:
And note that all of the entries have a little “Information Control” button on the right hand side. If you click on that:
You can have the information removed if it’s the memorial data you wrote for Find A Grave and you want it off the PeopleLegacy website. And it appears from a spot check that any biographical narratives “borrowed” from Find A Grave have also been removed, but there’s no way to see quickly whether that’s universally true for all memorials.
Oh, and when I accessed Find A Grave this morning, it asked me to prove I wasn’t a robot — the kind of program that can be used to swipe content.
Moving forward…
SOURCES
- See generally Judy G. Russell, “Some progress in FindAGrave image appropriation,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 25 Sep 2018 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 3 Oct 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). ↩
- Private email on behalf of Ancestry.com to JG Russell, 2 Oct 2018. ↩
Hi Judy,
A nit – it was “Wiki Heritage” not “Wiki Legacy”
Fixed, thanks! (I should have gotten a screen capture yesterday… 🙂 )
I’d discourage anyone from supplying their email address to that site. It appears to be a huge phishing scheme — likely created by a foreign hacker in Asia or Russia. It appears foreign actors in those geographies are beginning to target websites in the genealogy ecosystem.
One can always create and use a throwaway email… Just sayin’ …
Judy,
That’s just what I’ve used for years on many of these sites. A throw away email. It’s always best to have more than one email. I keep various websites, including FindAGrave, merchants, even PayPal and eBay completely separate from my personal and genealogy emails. So far so good.
Thanks for the update.
They had my mother’s info on there and I had requested it taken down at FindAGrave since she is still alive and there is no stone with her name on it. I finally got to the correct person(s) and it was taken off. When I checked peoplelegacy.com after I heard about it, they had the same information on there and using that “Control Information” bit today, I asked that it be removed – we’ll see if it happens or not.
Oy… that is MAJOR league annoying. Hope the take-down works.
What is sad is the entire web information was stolen from FindAGrave not just photos. All of the family connections etc. From a genealogy standpoint of connecting family members to each other or information only someone in the family might have given and not give the volunteer or the websit FindAGrave credit is totally wrong as well. I have to say due to their ethics I hate the idea of giving them my email to take down each one. Legally the entire site is. A result hacking. I can only assume they have all our emails and any information we ever posted. Yes when we posted in FindAGrave we knew all info was public and could be used and not credited to us or FindAGrave it still hurts/angers that a corporation needs to stoop to,this level and not be forced to take down the entire site.
There’s no question that what was done here is wrong and unethical. Whoever did this also violated his/her/its contract with Find A Grave (terms of service). The problem is, action to take down the whole site won’t be easy or quick — only copyrighted material gets that kind of treatment. And I wouldn’t give them an email address other than one used for this specific purpose.
I have people on findagrave who were born in West Virginia long after West Virginia became a state from Virginia and on peoplelegacy they had them all born in Virginia.. I thought the top of my head was going to blow off.. I mean, if you’re going to call yourself a website with that kind of information you should at least get the info correct if you’re going to steal it, just sayin!!
🙂
Judy, thank you for being first to know, and first to share. You are much appreciated.
I was able to request only 4 removals using the Information Control option. I have tried each day and get a notice I’ve reached the limit of requests.
You can always set up any number of email addresses with free services that you use only for this and then delete… Just sayin’ …
Hrmph… regarding the “information control” button, we should not have to request them to take down information an entry at a time! I have made hundreds of submissions to Find A Grave. I hope Ancestry forces them to take down the whole entire database.
Judy, may I share this article on my Genealogy TV Facebook page?
Anything I post is public. There’s always a Facebook share button at the bottom, and I also always note every new post on my own FB profile and you can share from there too. So go for it, and — though you didn’t and don’t every have to — thanks for asking.
I made a request to have information taken down on my g grandfather’s memorial and received an error message saying that I had exceeded the maximum number of requests and to contact the site administration to control more content! They are deliberately making it hard to remove information! They should be made to remove all information taken from Find-a-Grave. There are those of us who have over a thousand memorials on Find-a-Grave. Imagine how difficult it will be for us to remove them one by one!
Unfortunately, this is one of those “don’t tell me, tell them” situations. Right now the site contains what appears to be factual information only. There’s no copyright on that. It doesn’t have to make it easy to request a takedown of non-copyrighted data.
JUSTICE! Maybe that will put the brakes on places that operate on just what they steal.
Is there any protection from future companies doing the same kind of thing?
That’s a question for the Ancestry – Find-A-Grave programmers, but the fact that I encountered a challenge when accessing the site recently says they’re stepping up the game there.
I am trying to make contact with John Stoutimore, who in May 2015 was in the Hermann, Mo. area looking for the Horstmann Cemetery. I have located what I believe what he was looking for. It contains the graves of Christopher, his wife Louisa, along with Christine, and M.Charlotte, and some others hard to read graves. I to searched for this grave yard, because Christopher & Louisa were my Great, Great Grandparents. I would be more that willing to show it to you or anyone that wants to see it, I live very close to it.