What’s up with the upstart?
So… The Legal Genealogist has been trying to keep folks informed with developments in the dispute between Find A Grave and an upstart website called PeopleLegacy.com that swiped a whole bunch of content from Find A Grave and put it online on its own site.
Yesterday, I reported that Find A Grave and its owner Ancestry had won a big part of the fight with the upstart1 when PeopleLegacy removed the photos and narrative information it had taken from Find A Grave2 — and that’s a good thing.
But people had more questions, so let’s see what we do — and don’t — know.
Who’s behind the PeopleLegacy.com website?
Dunno. The website is going way way way out of its way to make sure nothing about who’s behind it gets disclosed. There’s no identification of its owners or operators in its About page. The Contact page is just a form — no address or phone or even name on it. Neither the Terms of Service page nor the Privacy statement page has a name or physical address — just a link to an email address. Its online registration information simply identifies the registrant as PeopleLegacy, Inc., and says the registrant is in Cyprus. Again, no name, address or phone number except for the registrar.
What did PeopleLegacy do that’s so bad?
It swiped images, narratives and data from Find A Grave while claiming that all of its content was “derived from public sources.” This violated (a) the copyrights of individual photographers who posted photos at Find A Grave, (b) the copyrights of individuals who wrote biographical sketches and memorials there, and (c) the terms of service of Find A Grave which clearly prohibit use of data scraping systems and state unequivocally that “download of the whole or material parts of any work or database from the Websites or any, resale, redistribution or publication of a work or database or portion thereof are prohibited, except for online or other republication of Content as unique data elements that are part of a unique family history or genealogy.”3
How do you know they did that?
Because my own copyrighted photos were included on PeopleLegacy’s site, and on Tuesday of this week the website admitted they were mine by adding a tagline that the images were copyrighted by me. And those images had never been posted anywhere else except on Find A Grave with my name attached in the form PeopleLegacy used.
Did PeopleLegacy remove everything it swiped from Find A Grave from its website?
It looks like all the photos and all the narrative material — biographies, obits and like — have been removed, though it’s impossible to say that this has been done universally without checking each and every entry. But all the data, including relationships to other people and the links among that data, is still there, and it’s pretty clear that those links had to come from Find A Grave data as well.
Doesn’t that violate Find A Grave’s copyright in its own work?
That’s where the rub comes in with all of this. You’d think it would, for sure. After all, U.S. copyright law protects what’s called a compilation copyright: “Compilations of data or compilations of preexisting works (also known as “collective works”) may also be copyrightable if the materials are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes a new work” — and an example is a “website containing, text, photos, and graphics.”4
But because purely factual information itself can’t be copyrighted,5 the factual data from the website may not be independently copyrightable, and to the extent that it’s regarded as a directory, there’s a U.S. Supreme Court case that specifically deals with directory listings that says it’s not protected by copyright law.6 (The law is very different in Europe, where databases like this are protected.)
But Find A Grave says you can’t swipe all of its content in its terms of service! Doesn’t that help?
It very well could if Ancestry and/or Find A Grave goes after the website owner (assuming it can figure out who that is) for breach of the contract in those terms of service. It’s still going to be an open question whether it’s a copyright violation. My personal opinion is that it is: it’s those links of person to person, for example, that’s at the heart of the Find A Grave presentation and that by itself should be copyrightable.
Can I make PeopleLegacy take down information about my family?
Yes, but apparently you can only ask to have four entries removed before the website says you have to contact the site administrator — that unknown face behind the website.
I have thousands of memorials I contributed and I want them removed. It’s not right to limit me to four.
It wasn’t right to swipe the info in the first place, and that didn’t stop PeopleLegacy from doing it…
Anything else we should know? I see there are the terms of service on PeopleLegacy.com…
Well, yeah, it really is a little ironic to find a provision that “User shall not implement the use of web site crawlers including, but not limited to automated robots and screen scraping software” since that’s realistically the only way the site could have swiped all those photos and memorials from Find A Grave…
SOURCES
- Yes, I’m deliberately not calling it a “start-up,” since “upstart” is a lot more accurate given the website’s behavior. ↩
- See Judy G. Russell, “One big step forward for Find A Grave,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 3 Oct 2018 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 4 Oct 2018). ↩
- See ¶ 2, “Find A Grave Terms of Service, Last updated on September 26, 2016 : Limited License” FindAGrave.com (https://www.findagrave.com/ : accessed 4 Oct 2018). ↩
- U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations, Circular 14, PDF at 1, Copyright.gov (https://www.copyright.gov/ : accessed 4 Oct 2018). ↩
- U.S. Copyright Office, “FAQs: What Does Copyright Protect?,” Copyright.gov (https://www.copyright.gov/ : accessed 4 Oct 2018) (“Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed”). ↩
- Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). ↩
Thank you so much for being so dogged in following up on this issue. Your efforts are very much appreciated.
Thank you Judy for all your expertise in this issue. We appreciate it. Appreciate all the updates.
Thank you for watching out for all of us.
Find-A-Grave has been a useful tool for me in gathering hints about next steps in my research, and a wonderful place to turn to in honoring the lives of my relatives and ancestors. I had reservations when Ancestry took it over. I admit I don’t like some of the changes, but they have done us all a great service in preserving the essence of Find-A-Grave. It sounds as if they are very serious about protecting not only their investment in it, but ours as well. Thanks, Judy, for keeping us updated on what is going on.
I believe the Findagrave memorials were copied last Spring. In May-June I had created or received transfers of about 100 memorials for newly discovered family. They are not on the PeopleLegacy site.
Person to person links bring up an interesting point. Are they considered “fact” by law? (Some of my family’s links on Find A Grave contain wrongly attributed relationships–so someone’s idea of a “fact”, but not the truth.)
They are facts, but the way they are presented is a different story.
I notice that GoDaddy is listed as the registrar. Can’t GoDaddy be held accountable? Isn’t it “mandatory” to provide an Admin contact? Shouldn’t GoDaddy take down a site that violates copyright laws?
No, GoDaddy is the registrar not the hosting company, and it’s the hosting company that has that responsibility under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not the registrar.