[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Copyright

[Jerry Frank]

As I (a layman) understand it, you cannot copyright data but copyright does 
apply to the form in which you publish it.

If you take public domain data (or any other data for that matter) and 
compile it with other stuff in a book, you would have copyright on the 
book.  However, someone else could extract the data and republish in a 
different format without breaching copyright.

For example, there is a book about the Lutheran parishes in Russian Poland 
which outlines, in paragraph form, date of origin, villages associated with 
the parish, statistical information, names of all the Pastors, etc.  We can 
extract the raw data and publish it in tabular form without breaching 
copyright.

I don't think you can apply copyright to your basic research.  You could 
only apply it to the published results of your research.  You are also 
allowed to copy and quote short portions of relevant material providing 
that you accurately cite the source and give credit to the author.

Another example are the maps I publish.  I used data and maps from other 
authors to compile my maps (i.e. Stumpp and Luck).  I did not breach 
copyright.  I drew my own map.  I used their maps to help locate many 
different places but I verified each one of them against public domain 
(government issue) topographical maps.  My map may look similar to theirs 
in many ways but there was no copyright infringement because the raw data 
cannot be copyrighted.



At 08:43 PM 16/10/2002 -0700, Laurelei Primeau wrote:
>How does one copyright genealogy research? Can you copyright information
>that is in the public domain or is the copyright on the organization of
>that information? What would constitute copyright infringement in the
>area of genealogy?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Laurelei

Jerry Frank - Calgary, Alberta
jkfrank at shaw.ca