Is taking Obituary screenshots off of the Internet against FamilySearch's Upload Guidelines and Poli

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I agree with the two paragraphs that you wrote, Joe.

However, I would say that I'm not expecting anyone to make a blanket statement. I'd just like someone legally-qualified to have a look at Don's question and answer it.

Speaking purely personally and applying logic, not legal knowledge, I (not FS) would apply a precautionary principle and advise people that obituaries (or any other newspapers, etc.) published less than (fill in the appropriate number here) years ago should not be copied / screen-shot / whatever and loaded into FSFT.

It might very well be that a lawyer could prove this was fair-use or some such but until said lawyer turns up and explicitly tells us, I suggest that FS needs to be cautious.

And I really apologise to Don for that suggestion but the worst case scenario is that a newspaper / media / whatever company starts to get fed up with seeing its content all over the internet and goes after a web-site. (Let's leave aside questions about whether said media company owns the copyrights in the first place - I said "worst case"...)

And if someone says that FS is in the clear because it's told its patrons not to load copyright material, well, it doesn't take much thought to come up with the loaded questions, "And does FS police that instruction? Does it respond to queries on the matter?"

I've got several obituaries downloaded on my PC at home. I wouldn't load them up into my blog or whatever. Link to them with a URL, yes. Quote them (attributed quote), yes. But not copy the full thing. Yes that's me. And until the lawyers come forth, the precautionary principle is all we have.

(And Joe - I really do appreciate your comments - I know you don't dictate to the programmers and I'm sure you're even less able to dictate to the lawyers. But I really would ask you to try to push this one issue through the channels.)

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: This situation is interesting to me because of the following:

1. A HUGE amount of information and images on the internet that is visible to everyone (i.e., not just behind pay walls) is copyright protected.

2. It is so massively common for people to see interesting things and just copy and send them to friends or post them in their various accounts that it seems as though there is nothing wrong with it.

3. A large amount of the copyright protected materials on the internet are NOT labeled as such.

For these reasons, many, many people regularly break the law without even knowing it--at least until someone's lawyer contacts them. And by then it will be too late.

Joe,

I agree with Adrian. If you could encourage the "powers that be" to expand on the documentation regarding copyright issues for things being posted to the FSFT, It would be really useful. Questions like the one that Don posted and others like "Can I make a copy of a Find A Grave picture and post it somewhere on FS such as memories or even as a portrait" continue to come up frequently. It would be great to have a common resource that we could direct these questions too.

And BTW, a good collection of EXAMPLES of things that should not be brought into the FS website would be really useful as well.

None of this stuff is real black-and-white since the short answer to most related questions is "It depends". But enough examples could raise the awareness of many to exercise more caution.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I don’t post images of gravestones unless I have taken the photo myself. And because the photos are available on FindaGrave, I don’t see any reason to posting a copy on FamilySearch— and, as far as that goes, no one should be posting photographs from that site, permission granted by the photographer or not. The same is true of scanned, regularly available certificates.