Nola and Elizabeth,
I entirely agree with what both of you are saying. My point is, however, is
that this now opens up the idea for every Tom, Dick and Harry Search engine
to do something similiar. Ancestry has created something that no one even
thought of before, in their efforts to "create new avenues of research".
But I think we have to be prepared for the same type of thing to happen
again, I am sure some computer techy will figure out some other way of
getting around with what we all have objected to in the past few days about
Ancestry's database. There must be some kind of compromise that will make
all sides happy, otherwise there is going to be more panic among the
researchers and webpage owners alike. The question is, are we going to
continue to worry about it and stop what we are doing, or are we going to
try to come up with a plan that we all can live with?
Deloris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nola Duffy" <nduffy(a)patch.net>
To: <ncgenweb-discuss(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2007 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: [NCGENWEB-DISCUSS] Complaints from researchers
Deloris,
I imagine you did follow all the side-steps and mis-steps
before they actually gave in. The first version, that was
online less than 2 days, had every page cached and you could
not find the URL of the real page and it was only for paying
subscribers. That was dramatically different than what
Google does. Their first concession was to make it free but
even then the 2nd trial did not even allow you to know the
URL you were viewing. The third time up the flag pole, they
included the URL to the real pages. They then realized that
thousands of pages had been taken offline and every blog
that they had captured was showing pages designed to condemn
their actions. Finally, this morning, the entire database
was gone. It might have been a bit more logical if they had
only tried it with Rootsweb which they do own, but they
literally captured every site in the English speaking world.
The database included all the copyrighted material on every
college site and county historical or genealogy society in
the country as well. They could have gotten away with it if
they had done the ethical thing of letting the entire
internet community know they intended to deploy their bot
but they waited until they had captured the entire country,
both private and commercial, before announcing it publicly
and then it took a short while before they even gave the
name of the bot.
There was absolutely nothing that anyone could have done to
prevent this because it was done with utmost secrecy. From
what little I have learned, even Rootsweb was not told in
advance. Now, we do know that the process has been patented
and we can protect our data if we wish to do so. I for one
still feel I owe it to everyone who has submitted
copyrighted material to a site I host to protect their
material from commercial exploitation.
Nola
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