John,
I'll have to look up the court cases, the majority of them involve
shrinkwrap, but the debate among intellectual property rights attorneys
is that clickwrap/clickON would turn out the same results.
A few involve the redistribution of sound files from site to site on the
Internet.
As far as licensing facts, next time you click on an "I agree" where an
Online Service Provider allows you access into their domain, i.e. FTM,
ancestry.com, and others read the Terms of Service carefully. What they
are doing is licensing the facts, much like Microsoft license the
Encyclopedias they package.
If you reread the USGW notice carefully, you will notice the requirement
to obtain in writing from the submitter the use of the material
presented. It doesn't say how much or how little, it just says you must
get the written permission and have it verified by the USGW File monitor
for that file. This in effect is a licensing facts. The submitter is
allowing you a limited contract to use the facts obtained on that
electronic page by means of a license (written piece of paper).
Once a person clicks on the page to view material, they are obligated to
obey the text of the license agreement (aka USGW notice). Unlike all
other Fair Use adventures, where an individual can extract and use
information as long as they make a bibliographic reference; a license
agreement voids all Fair Use standards.
Like you say, one can be deceptive about it and change data around,
disguise it, etc..but then what does that make us. Intellectual
Property thieves for one and if we are caught, subject us to liabilities
so accessed by a court of law. What's worse, if a counter suit was
filed, USGW, Rootsweb or any other online service provider could be
brought into the case and matters would really get stirred up. For
instance, if USGW had not maintained in a file, all permission slips
from users, then the defendant would probably win the case as the court
would rule that USGW cannot possibly track who has what and on that I
would agree. But, under the law, all licensers are required to track,
so that puts USGW in a bad spot.
You are absolutely correct about some data incapable of being
copyrighted. That data is considered Public data and may be freely
used. However, license agreements are different. If I put the text of
the constitution on my website and have a license arrangement that no
one may copy this from my website, that license would stand. It would
be awfully hard to prove though if it was copied. However, in less
known documents, like the marriage of XXXX county, one could make a
case. There may only be a handful of people who have extracted actual
marriage data for that county and it may be easy to prove that you got
the data from their licensed web site or from the licensed USGW.
I'm with you, a simple (c)1999, Name, Location or whatever is totally
sufficient to cover just about all aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights. To turn a simple copyright notice into license agreement
defeats the purpose of the archives.
James W. McCluer
-----Original Message-----
From: John Bush <john_bush(a)hotmail.com
To:
OHGEN-L(a)rootsweb.com <OHGEN-L(a)rootsweb.com
Date:
Friday, July 30, 1999 6:03 PM
Subject: Re: [OHGEN-L] Proposed USGW Notice (Copyright Notification)
>My concern is the current attempt to make Archive Data subject to
a
>ClickON or ClickWrap licensing agreement. This move by itself,
negates
>all Fair Use standards under the copyright law and has been tested
in
>several state courts.
Do you have anymore details about the cases where this was upheld? I
can't
see how you could even license facts. And if you did, why would
anyone
ever
want to use them (you couldn't put them into your genealogy
program
because
you would send them out again in Gedcoms.) Also, you could go back to
the
source and look at the originals and then do whatever you wanted. It
all
seems strange to me.
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