Hi, Barbara,
"Section 3. In The USGenWeb Project, copyright to data contributed to any
***special projects*** resides with the contributor, who agrees that The
USGenWeb
Project, as a not-for-profit group, has permanent use of the data.
The permanent use agreement is conditional upon the non-profit nature
of The USGenWeb Project and will become null and void if The USGenWeb Project
should ever cease to be non-profit.
The section that you quote (section 3) deals only with data contributed to
the special projects. These special projects are defined later in Article 13
(the Archives, Census, and Tombstone Projects.) These special projects are
supplementary stand-alone projects, and they do NOT include the state and
county web pages, so section number 3 doesn't apply to you and your county
site.
(If you're new, you may not be aware of these special projects yet. It took
me about half a year to discover them. If so, go to the main USGenWeb page,
and follow the links for the special projects.)
You wrote:
The by - laws in there own words do say GenWeb can
continue to use it well after I've said stop.
Only in the Archives Project and only if you specifically give the Archives
Project permission to use it. Things don't automatically end up there.
There has to be a specific request by the author that materials be placed in
the archives, and it has to be accompanied by permission for permanent use.
They won't use it unless you give them that permission.
Anything you put on a county or state web page will not end up in the
Archives Project unless you want to also put it there.
The idea behind permanent use is to discourage people from putting something
in, then asking for it to be removed. (In point of fact, though, I
understand that the archives has honored requests for removal of material on
some occasions.)
Basically the right of permanent use doesn't void the contributing author's
copyright. If he/she wants to, he/she can go ahead and publish this work in
book form, put it on another website, etc., since he/she still has the
copyright to it. (It does in some sense decrease the value of that
copyright, since people can now get the info on-line for free, so why should
they buy a book, etc. Authors should think carefully about what the market
value of their work may be before deciding to make their work available in
the Archives Project. Most of the data in the Archives has little
marketability by itself, and much of the data is actually already public
domain.)
One of the criticisms of the initial by-laws was that they didn't restrict
the meaning of 'use' closely enough in this context. That's why the second
sentence was added. Basically the special projects 'use' of data
contributed to them has to be 'non-profit.' If they ever try to make a
profit in their 'use' of it, they lose the right to use it.
Ed Book