I publish two newspapers and neither I nor anyone on my staff has ever
written an obituary. They are all e-mailed to us by either the funeral home
or a family member and we usually just copy and paste.
You will probably find that is pretty consistent throughout the industry.
We would never exercise any claim of copyright on obituaries we publish.
Dale
-----Original Message-----
From: ohgen-bounces(a)rootsweb.com [mailto:ohgen-bounces@rootsweb.com] On
Behalf Of Holly Timm
Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2010 10:43 AM
To: ohgen(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: [OHGENWEB] regarding posting obituaries
Mark,
As someone who once had the job of obituary writer at a newspaper, along
with other writing tasks, generally the funeral home provides information
obtained by them from the family of the deceased. The newspaper then writes
the obituary using the information but usually neither the funeral home nor
the family actually writes the obituary.
Holly
-----Original Message-----
From: ohgen-bounces(a)rootsweb.com [mailto:ohgen-bounces@rootsweb.com] On
Behalf Of Mark Lozer
Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2010 12:05 PM
To: ohgen(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: [OHGENWEB] regarding posting obituaries
Hi Maggie,
Question, how does an obituary become the literary property of a
newspaper? Obituaires are written and prepared by the family of the
deceased as part of the funeral home package for which they are charged. The
funeral home takes care of submitting the prepared obituary to all the
newspaper the family request it to appear in and they are charged for each
according to the rates of the various newpapers. I understand that if your
source of the obituary is a specific newspaper that they should be given
credit but do not understand why there should be an issue of the newspaper
having to give permission to post a copy. These days many funeral homes
also have websights and post obituaries there as well. Funeral homes also
make up bookmarks and other items which they print the obituaries on It
seems to me that with so many places obituaries are found these days that it
would be hard for anyone entity to take any legal action for posting an
obituary transcription. I would think if permission is needed, that it
should come from the surviving family member(s) that prepared the obituary
since they are the ones that composed and paid for its publishing, Many
people write their own obituaries and I suppose in that case control of it's
use would pass to the survivor as well. Now if your are talking about
posting an actual scan of a specifc newspaper, I could understand that there
may be a requirement to get permission from the newspaper to do that.
Then also there may have been a time period in the past from the 1930's to
present where an obituary was actually written by someone on the newspaper
staff, but in todays world this is rarely the case with the exception of a
special feature the you see where a newspaper publishes it's own special
obituary of an prominent individual.
Just some thoughts. I no legal expert but it just seems to me that we are
giving newspapers to much control here. I get many requests directly from
family members of the deseased to post obituaries and I think they should
have every right to grant permission to do so without being concerned with
whether it is ok with a newspaper or in many cases the several newspapers
that carried the obituary.
Mark Lozer
817 N. Fulton St.
Wauseon, OH 43567
lozer(a)fulton-net.com
Fulton County Ohio GenWeb Page Coordinator
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ohfulton/
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