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Archive for August 29, 2007
Ancestry.com: Thieves, Hypocrites, Blunderers, or Fair Users?
I got an e-mail from Janice Brown of Cow Hampshire, telling me about Ancestry.com’s “Internet Biography Collection.” I always appreciate hearing about new resources on the Web. But the problem here is that Ancestry.com, a commercial, for-profit enterprise, has appropriated Janice’s work, the work of a number of other bloggers and noncommercial webmasters, and MINE!
Ancestry explains its new collection thusly:
There are, it seems to me, several problems with this. First, what Ancestry has done is more than “sample” the “biographical sketches;” they’ve cached whole pages and sites. And they admit implicitly that the data is not theirs. This is just as if they had reproduced, without permission, pages from a printed book. In the case of GeneaBlogie, they’ve reproduced numerous pages relating to almost every one of the surnames I’ve researched. Ancestry.com’s actions are made all the more galling by the attitude they’ve taken with respect to what is arguably fair use of their intellectual property. And where in marketing school do they teach that it’s a good idea to rip off and piss off some of your best customers? The marketing missteps of The Generations Network are unbelievable. Do they have any lawyers? You can bet I’m going to find out. The genea-blogsphere is in an uproar over this. See Miriam at AnceStories; Amy Crooks of Untangled Family Roots;
This database contains a sampling of biographical sketches found on English language web pages throughout the entire World Wide Web. Web pages can vary greatly in the amount of information they contain about a given person, and in the number of related and unrelated people mentioned on the same page. The information source and the central topic of each page will also vary greatly. Given facts should be verified using other sources. One unique and valuable feature of this web-based collection is the number of hyperlinks leading from each page in the collection to other web pages of possible interest on related topics.
and Susan Kitchens (who’s got a great parody!).
Susan Kitchens has isolated the bot that is being used to scrape the sites.
Preview: The Story of the 1890 Census
We all “know” that the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire at the Commerce Department in January, 1921. But do we know the whole story of the 1890 census?
The 1890 census was in trouble long before that tragic night in 1921. The Superintendent of the Census, one R.P. Porter, had to constantly defend his work against charges that the 1890 enumeration was “illegal,” “fraudulently,” “a waste of taxpayers money,” and “inaccurate.” These allegations came from all corners of the country.
What caused the fire? Could it have been sparked by the thirty years of controversy?
Starting Wednesday, August 29, at GeneaBlogie: The Story of the 1890 Census
