After reading Jason's message, I just took a look at this site, and I
have some serious concerns about the same kind of issues that he
reported.
The home page is at
http://www.ncroots.com/
and bears the message
"Please visit this site later we are new and under construction"
yet several of the pages I inspected have copyright dates of 2000 and
2001, so it isn't entirely new, and Jason indicated that his
correspondence with Diane regarding the Bladen county page was about
two years ago.
The general information on North Carolina on this site includes a
page of links, with the following section:
Online Genealogy & History Projects of the U.S.
Migrations Project - ancestrial migration patterns.
AHGP Project - American History and Genealogy. & Special Topics
ALHN Project - American Local History Network.
GenExchange
Legacy Preservation Society
US Biographies Project
USIGS Project
USGenWeb Census Project (the one at
http://www.us-census.org)
Note that the NCGenWeb project is NOT listed.
Some of the
ncroots.com pages bear a striking resemblance to past or
present NCGenWeb pages for the same counties, e.g. Beaufort County.
We have never really resolved the issue of whether a given person
should have multiple pages for the same county in different projects.
Personally I think it's a bad idea, because it deprives the end user
of the diversity of different people's pages, but I don't see that
it's illegal.
However, when NCGenWeb pages are being copied verbatim without
permission, there are grounds for complaint. I would like to call
the readership's attention to the Surry County page on
NCROOTS.com:
http://ncroots.com/Surry/
The entire contents of the page are as follows:
1) "Surry County was formed from Rowan County. It was named in honor
of Lord Surrey, a member of Parliament who protested the taxes levied
on the colonisis [sic] by the British. The County Seat is Dobson."
2) a list of "Some Surnames". A look at Linda Sorrell's NCGenWeb
page for Surry County
http://www.geocities.com/~surryco/
reveals that this list of names has been copied, badly, from the list
of researchers for specific surnames on Linda's page. There are many
typos, but the order of names is identical.
3) a list of "Some Data Links":
Surry County wills
Surry County Marriages
Cobler Family Cemetery
Union Hill Friends Church Cemetery
ALL FOUR of the above are links to Linda Sorrell's NCGenWeb site, but
are not identified as such
and these are followed by three extremely general links:
Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites for North Carolina
Genealogy Search Engines
Internet Search Engines
At the bottom of this page appear the words
"© Hosted by Terria 2000, 2001"
I would argue that there is NO original material on this page worth
copyrighting, and that NCGenWeb has legitimate grounds for complaint
about this site. However, since Terria is no longer part of
NCGenWeb, that's another issue unless Diane or some other NCGenWeb CC
is involved in the administration of the
ncroots.com project.
Terria also hosts the Wilkes County page on
ncroots.com, and has done
a similar thing with the surname lists there.
Furthermore, the Alamance county page on ncroots, which is hosted by
B.J. Rountree, has a list of surnames cribbed from the list on the
NCGenWeb page. Compare
http://ncroots.com/Alamance/
and
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ncalaman/surnames.html
The introductory material about the history of Alamance county also
bears a striking resemblance to that on the NCGenWeb page.
------
In summary, I find that on several
ncroots.com pages there is
virtually NO new or unique information, and what little does appear
was taken directly from NCGenWeb without acknowledgement.
Diane, can you please clarify your relationship to this project?
Your name appears at the bottom of
http://www.ncroots.com/usefulLinks.htm as webmaster, but with
copyright dates of 2000 and 2001, not 2002. Do you have any current
involvement with these pages? If not now, then when did your
association with this project end? Were you responsible for, or did
you sanction, the wholesale borrowing from the corresponding county
pages at NCGenWeb?
--
Elizabeth Harris
ncgen(a)mindspring.com
NCGenWeb project:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ncgenweb/
Winston-Salem NC area genealogy:
http://www.fmoran.com/