Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the last time slot of the 2018 RootsTech Conference. Thank you very much for coming to my talk and not leaving early. I appreciate it. As you can see on my slide, I would appreciate it if everybody could please turn off cell phones, pagers, and anything else that might make noise. Another speaker earlier today had a slide that said 100% of people whose phones go off during a talk were absolutely convinced that they were turned off.

As I mentioned, also, please don't take photos of the slides. This is what I do for a living, and amazingly enough, it's about copyright. I have copyright to my intellectual property. So this is----Online Does Not Equal Free, or Why Would They Put It on the Web If They Didn't Want Me to Use It? Because copyright issues are definitely something genealogists need to think about. One more subtle reminder. Now, the problem with copyright and genealogy--you can hear a genealogist talk about the fact that no one could copyright her family. This is my family, and this is my information. But then she says nobody else has a right to print the information in a book or put it online. Obviously, those are diametrically opposed opinions there. So copyright is very relevant for genealogy. I want to help you understand how it affects you, your research, and how you present your research to other people.

Copyright itself is a form of protection provided by the laws of the U.S. and other countries to authors of, the quote from our copyright, "original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible form of expression." Now what does that mean? OK, you think about a literary work. Somebody wrote a book. If you print and publish a genealogy, that is covered by copyright. Musical works--I've seen people who have produced plays, musicals, songs about their families. That's covered by copyright also. Dramatic works, pantomimes--you wouldn't think about pantomime being anything, but essentially, it is a fixed form of expression, a specific series of actions--also copyrightable. Pictures, graphics, sculptures--definitely all covered by copyright. And in particular relevance for genealogy, we have tombstones. We don't often think about that when we go to a cemetery and look at a tombstone for one of our family members. But whoever created that could have enforced a copyright on it, and some do. Motion pictures, other audiovisual works, if you put together a family CD with a series of photographs, maybe with some music in the background, you've created something with a copyright in it. If you interview your family members, package that, and share it with other family members, well, you have a copyright on that. And even architecture is copyrightable. When you have a copyright for something, it gives you certain rights. You can reproduce the work yourself. You can prepare derivative works. You can distribute copies of your actual work. You can perform a work publicly if it's a play or a song. You can display it. And it means you have the right to authorize others to do that, also, and the right to say to others they don't have the right to do that. It is your property. You can do with it as you choose. Now, as far as genealogy, really, the things that we tend to run into the most often--books and photographs are two of the most common, but--a newsletter article, whether it's in a genealogy society, if you write a newsletter for your family surname, if you create an index--as an indexer, I can tell you, not all indices are created the same. So if you and I create two different indices for the same book, we each have a separate copyright. Any artwork--I was just discussing with Cathy in the front row. She and her siblings inherited her mother's estate. They inherited the painting. They also inherited a copyright to the painting. Cathy, as part of her share, owns the painting. They did not change the distribution of the copyright because those are two separate things. If I buy your painting, unless you tell me I have the copyright also and can do something with it, I don't. You still control that. A lot of artists will sell prints because they maintain their copyright. But they've sold the original to somebody else. So I just gave Kathy some advice on how to handle that for the copyright office. Because until she and her siblings decide who owns the copyright, since they all inherit it equally, all three of them have one-third share of the copyright in her mother's painting, two separate pieces of property. I don't understand. The author--I mean, the painter owns the copyright even after they sell the painting. OK, the question is whether the painter still owns the copyright to the painting. Yes, unless you specifically give someone else the copyright. In this instance, they all inherited it because their mother passed away. But if you're living, and I buy your painting, and you do not sign over the copyright to me, I don't own it. You still have the copyright. [INAUDIBLE] We'll talk about that. The way copyright works today, as soon as you create something, you have a copyright in it. It didn't used to be. And even websites and blogs and things like email, by creating that, you have something that has been copyrighted. When you're using others' materials, you want to look at things like family books, and newsletters, and websites.

Does it have a copyright on it? Do you need to ask permission before you put it in yours? Don't just willy nilly start using stuff. In particular for genealogy, I look to societies. The officers, newsletter and journal editors, and web masters, who are most of the time the people who are distributing information to their society members, they should be models for their members. They should take the time to learn about this, so they don't put themselves and their societies at any risk of litigation.

I used to edit the newsletter for the California State Genealogical Alliance. And we had a couple of societies who were very confused about copyright. I hate writing. I actually wrote an editorial for the newsletter because this matter needed to be brought to their attention. One society had a really nice timeline I wanted to reprint in the newsletter and share with everybody else. And when I asked them, you didn't put an author's name on it. Who wrote that? Can I get permission to reprint it? You know, I can't find the author's name. Let me get back to you on that. And a few days later, oh, we copied that from a website. We don't really know who wrote it.

The other society was fortunate enough to have their group profiled in the L.A. Times, which is actually really good publicity for a genealogy group. But then they said, hi, we have this great article. Can you print it in the newsletter? Did you get permission from the Times? I'm not going to risk having the Times be mad at me. They'd never even thought about it. It turns out, even for an itsy bitsy, teeny weeny genealogy society, the Times wanted $250 for a one-time use. Amazingly enough, I did not reprint the article. So obviously, this is a big thing for me. I try and make sure that societies know what they should be doing because both of those things could have put the societies at risk. Yes sir. So in that instance, in your article, could you source--go to L.A. Times [INAUDIBLE]?? Giving credit is not getting permission. I actually have something. It just means you didn't plagiarize it. In fact, what do you know? That's the next slide. Plagiarism and copyright violation are two very different things. Plagiarism's like you don't tell me who--that's what the first society did by not saying where it came from, who authored it. It made it seem like it came from that society. So yes, technically speaking, they absolutely plagiarized in that instance. They also violated someone's copyright because they didn't get permission and couldn't even tell me where to find it on the web. I'm a good web searcher. I found it and asked permission. I don't remember if I mentioned that the other group had used it without permission. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, a link would have been fine. Yeah, so if they wanted to do it in their own newsletter and say, we were profiled by the L.A. Times. Here's a link. As of right now, that is perfectly permissible. There are some people arguing that you shouldn't even be able to do that, and that's just illogical. I'm not giving you the article. It's like me telling you, look in the library catalog and find this book.

So things you can't copyright--not everything is copyrightable. Trademarks cover things like titles, short slogans, and symbols. So when Prince changed his name to that whatever it was, he trademarked it so somebody else couldn't copy it. Things like principles, concepts, and processes have to be patented. And then there are a lot of things that automatically fall in the public domain. Nobody can put a copyright on it. So a piece of information, a fact, a date--whoops. Wait a sec.

As in my theoretical genealogist at the beginning, any pieces of information she's gathered on her family, most of that is going to be public domain because it's going to be basic facts about her family members. Lists or tables from public documents, no copyright. Anything defined in the public domain, which in the U.S. is anything published before 1923--automatically public domain.

And in the U.S., anything published by our federal government is, by definition, public domain. So none of that can be copyrighted by anybody.

There are fair use provisions in copyright. It has to be limited. It has to be for a transformative purpose. And it's not absolutely agreed upon by different courts what falls under fair use. The things they take into account are the purpose and character of the use. Teaching is usually one of the approved uses if it's a small amount.

The nature of the copyrighted work itself. How much of it you use. The rule of three is if you use three or more words verbatim from some work, you should probably put it in quotation marks and list a citation. If you use three or more paragraphs from a book, you should probably get permission before just putting it into your book and giving it a quote and crediting it.

One of the things that, in particular, there's not a clear, consistent thing in the courts, is the 10% rule. Did you use less than 10%? And if you're doing things like changing something such as some kind of artwork, did you change more than 10%? Sometimes it's hard to judge how much 10% is. And sometimes it's hard for them to decide whether that's enough of a change, that you didn't violate somebody else's copyright. And definitely, one of the important things, especially for damages, the effect of use on the value of the original work. If you go around photocopying a book and giving it out to everybody, the value of that original work to the person who produced it has been greatly reduced because, obviously, that person is not getting income from it, though revenues are not the only thing that are considered. Now there is a difference between published and unpublished. Something is published when it enters the public forum.

So, when a book's actually been published and you can buy it at a store, when a photograph has been put onto a carte de visite by a photograph studio and you now take it home, if you have performed a play in front of other people--when some way it's going beyond you, that's the public forum. That's publishing it. Unpublished materials have slightly different time periods for how long they can be copyrighted. But if it's a private diary that has never been out of your family, that's not published. Film photo negatives that have never been developed, that's also not published. There is a website that goes around finding abandoned and damaged photo and film negatives and develops them. Because they've developed them, they own the copyright to it. Before that, it was not published at all.

Now, in the public domain in the U.S., as I said, anything published before 1923, just by definition, straight across the board, you cannot own a copyright on something before that. [INAUDIBLE] Anything published before '23. So if any of his writings were done before '23, in 1922 on December 31, that is public domain. That doesn't mean somebody might not sue you because one of the things that makes this difficult is who has the money to try and pick on somebody else? But the copyright legal definition, if it's published before '23, it's public domain.

Now, from '23 to 1977, it gets a little fuzzy. First, when you put it out, you had to put the name of it, whatever your work was, the year you were doing it, and either the word copyright or the copyright symbol. If you didn't do that, it was not fully copyrighted. Between '23 and '63, the initial copyright period ran for 28 years, and you could renew it for up to 67 years. You had to renew it. So a lot of stuff that even may have had a copyright at the initial period, most of it was not renewed. So a huge amount of stuff in this period is public domain. But if you want to use it, you really need to investigate it and see, is it available to you? And from '64 to '77, they decided to make it easier on people, and they just said, fine. It's automatically renewed. But before '64, most of that stuff that came out, nowadays really is not copyrighted. Was it yearly renewal? Was it yearly renewal? No, it was something that you just had to go back, and then it was renewed for up to 67 years.

Now, after that, 1978 and later, first, it had to have the copyright symbol. 1989 said, you don't have to do that anymore. But it was automatically copyrighted when you put the copyright thing on it.

For the length, life of the author plus 70 years or 2047, whichever is later. Now, from January '78 to March '89, your required copyright notice had to be filed within five years of entering the public forum, five years of being published and available to other people. Since March of '89, you do not have to put a copyright notice. By simply creating it, you have a copyright in that item. Corporate works are copyrighted for 95 years and anonymous works for 95 years. If it's something with multiple authors, it's the last one to die, which could really extend something far out. If it's unpublished, if it never entered the public forum, then it's the life of the author plus 70 years. So somebody who died in 1948 would be expiring this year, 70 years later. If it's anonymous, corporate, or known death date, 120 years from creation. So that would be 1898 and earlier. Those are now in the public domain. So obviously there's a lot of fine gradations here. Yes, sir. So if something's anonymous, who owns the copyright? We don't know because it's anonymous. However, what it says is that even though it's anonymous, you're not supposed to just take it and use it as your own. Depending on how it was done, like some books that were published officially anonymous by actual publishing companies, they were supposed to take the copyright revenues and hold them. Anonymous makes things very difficult, but it just means that no, you're not supposed to. Is anyone ever going to come and get you if it's anonymous? Unlikely. But somebody might if they later determine who that person was. Oh, look, you recopied that whole book. People have done that. People have gone to great lengths sometimes to find who an anonymous author was and then try and collect from people who reuse the work. OK, you? I'm a little confused. You told us that anything prior to 1923-- Anything published before 1923. Unpublished means it had not entered the public forum. OK? It wasn't published in a book. It was a private diary. It was a photo that was never developed. Or it was self-published and stayed within the family. That would be a book like--something which didn't have a name on it. I'm confused, too. You said diaries, and private or undeveloped photos. Those were a couple of examples, yes. [INAUDIBLE] is that overruled by this because this says unpublished? [INAUDIBLE]

Is that overruled? Well, we're going to go--OK, the question is about things that were unpublished. All I did with this slide, talking about what kind of things are unpublished. If it's never entered the public forum, if it's a private diary that stayed in the family, if it's films that haven't been developed. So this was just discussing what kinds of items are unpublished. Then when we go forward-- Come on. Go forward again. Never go--

It ate one of my slides. There we go. These are the dates when it is unpublished. So say your grandmother wrote a diary and you know when she died, but it's never gone out of the family. The copyright on that would expire 70 years after she had died. Oh, really? Mhm. If it's more than 70 years, then there's no copyright. If there is still a copyright, it would be like Kathy's mother's painting. Who owns the copyright? Who inherited the diary? But I can't get a copyright from what she did. I see postcards that are old, and people have reprinted them. And they said they have the copyright for those old postcards. OK, people have sometimes taken old things and reprinted them and claim copyright. That doesn't necessarily mean they really have a copyright because they may not fully understand it. Each one has to be looked at on an individual basis, depending on who wrote the postcard, how old was it, when did that person die, when did the person republish it. All of those things come into deciding, did that person even have a right to claim a copyright? So I couldn't say whether they did or not. It would depend on all those factors. Yes, Kathy. OK, so a book book or an amazon.com book-- I get that. That's published. It's out there if I've released it. Let's say I'm making a bunch of books, photobooks like from Walgreens, and I'm giving them out to all of family. Are they still considered not in the public, and thus would be unpublished? OK, so she say whether like a book on Amazon versus if I do a bunch of photobooks say from a Walgreens' photo publishing service. I believe, by doing it through Walgreens where other people are seeing it, it can be defined as having entered the public forum. Exactly, and I'm recommending that people do that for genealogy books. And I need to tell them then-- Right, well, that means it gives it a copyright. By having done it in some way where other people are seeing it, not-- If you did it yourself at home and did it on a copy machine, that would probably qualify as unpublished, not the public. But by doing it through a public company, which has access to that information, I believe that does qualify as having entered the public forum because other people have seen the material. So Walgreens or Shutterfly? Yep, like I do a bunch through Shutterfly. You and then you. I have a question about referring to genealogy. You'll have to speak up because I really can't hear you. Sorry, in Genealogy, whenever we're researching and finding things online, like Find a Grave, and if they'll have information or they'll have pictures, things like that. How does this work? How can we copy those things and put them on our family tree? Is that public domain, to have it on Find a Gave or to have it on-- You find information about your relative-- OK, so the question is when you find things online, in particular, she asked about Find a Grave, there's dates, there's pieces of information. There's photos. How do you use that? Well, the dates come under the facts part. They can't copyright that. They may not be accurate, but it's just a date. They can't claim a copyright on it because they're saying this is a factual piece of information about a person. Photos it very clearly says on the Find a Grave site are copyrighted, and Find a Grave has always made that clear, that there was a copyright on all the photos. And if you want to reuse a photo, you need to ask the person's permission, whoever posted it there. Some of them actually have a little note saying you can use this. Most of them have a note saying ask me. One of the journals I used to edit, I found a photo of someone's grave and e-mailed the person and asked her.

She said I was the first person who had ever bother to ask permission. People don't ask. But yes, it's very clear on Find a Grave, you're supposed to ask.

Realistically, if all you ever do with this information is put it in your family tree program on your computer and you don't share it with your family members and never put it online, no one's ever going to find you. If you want to do a family book and share it with your family members, then this is why I'm doing this, to let you know, these are the things that you should be thinking about. So keeping it unpublished versus published is a huge factor in how much you really do need to think about it.

And ah, that was the other one. With the unpublished photographs, if somebody finds the film-- Speak up. With the unpublished photographs, if somebody finds the film and develops it, the original photographer still has the copyright, right? Unpublished photographs and somebody else develops it, does the original one have the copyright? The trouble is with that is that, yes, the person probably does, depending on when it dates from. But this gets back into an anonymous thing that's out there. Sometimes people have come back and said that was mine. So it can get you in trouble. If it's something that's been lost for six years, is the person ever going to find you? Probably not. But what's right and what people do are not always the same thing. If I hire a photographer to work for me [INAUDIBLE] does the photographer own the copyright or do I? If I hire a photographer to work for me, does he own the copyright, or do I? That depends on the contract you have with the photographer. Do you put it in there that it's worked for hire, and you own the copyright? If you don't put that in there, it's still his copyright. This is why school photos are usually copyrighted the photo studio, and you have to go back to them to get legal copies of the photo because they set that up specifically so they will continue to make revenue. So yeah, it all depends on what your contract says with him. Foreign publications-- generally the concepts are going to be the same. The specific time periods might be different. So something might be copyrighted here but not copyrighted in another country or the other way around. You need to investigate if you're trying to do something that was printed in a foreign country and has a foreign copyright on it because every country is going to have slightly different things that they do. Now, our government, as I said, by definition in our copyright laws, anything created by the federal government or any of its employees, belongs to the public, is public domain. So if you find a USGS topo map, well, USGS is part of the federal government. Those are federal employees. You can use that map in your book because there is no copyright on it. It's public domain. State, county, and local governments may have different rules. Some states do claim copyright. Some don't. You have to investigate who published it, what are their rules. Foreign governments usually do have a copyright on their federal level, and that's usually about 50 years. But you'll have to investigate if you're using something.

What about images of the US census? The US census itself is considered to be public domain because that's the federal government. The images-- then you're getting into this quasi, where people don't always agree. If something is an exact image of something, usually the copyright still rests how it did originally. If you look at census images on ancestry.com, usually somewhere on the page in very tiny writing is myfamily.com. So they've adjusted the image, saying, ah, you used our image. I don't know that any genealogy web site has ever sued somebody for using a census image. So I don't know how a court would rule on that. It's a tough one. But one of the things they do to protect the fact that they put this time and effort and money into digitizing things is why they have subscription web sites, so they're recouping their money that way. So again, back to Kathy's example, ownership does not automatically include the copyright. If you own the photos that the photographer took but you didn't get the copyright from him under a work for hire, he still owns the copyright. If I buy Kathy's mother's painting but don't buy the copyright from her and her siblings, they still own the copyright. I have a lovely painting I can put on my wall, but I can't reprint it. I can't use it on a book cover. Works for hire are usually contract work. And usually as part of that contract, the copyright is conveyed to the person who is paying for it. Not always, it still depends on what you're going to do in your contract, but it's a very common thing. And I see a hand up that there. On pictures that you've brought over from Find a Grave, if you're bringing that over to the FamilySearch, that goes out to everybody. How is that covered? If you're using a photo from Find a Grave, you're supposed to follow copyright law. Find a Grave, even before Ancestry bought, has always made that very clear. I don't know if Find a Grave and FamilySearch have any kind of agreement. I'm not sure what kind of agreement they could reach because those are a lot of individual copyrights. A lot of things in genealogy like that, people don't always pursue. Just because it's illegal doesn't mean somebody is going to come after you for doing it. I'm explaining what you should be doing. On a practical level, somebody on Find a Grave probably is not going to come after you. If somebody is a professional photographer, goes through a cemetery, and takes a bunch of beautifully composed photos, and puts them on find the grave, that person may actually, oh, you use that on FamilySearch. Excuse me, did you ask for my permission? If it's an amateur, less likely to do that. Yes? I have a-- it's an autobiography [INAUDIBLE],, shortly before she died in 1928, but it's never been so-called published. OK, well, if she died and 28 plus 70 years, means it went public domain in 1998. If I transcribe it and publish it, does it change the copyright? If she transcribes it, does it change the copyright? It does not change the copyright on the original. Absolutely not because she died in 28. 70 years is 1998, PD. Transcriptions can be covered by copyright because the way you and I transcribe something is not always going to be the same. So if you transcribe it and publish it, which puts it out there in the public forum, yes, you can claim a copyright on the transcription, just not on the original. OK.

Oh, yes. Back to things that include copyright. So separate versus collective works, as I mentioned, if there are multiple authors in something, then you have to take into account when everybody has died before that totally expires. And they can assign their copyrights to somebody else also. Minors, it's mostly a matter-- They own the copyright, but it usually is considered that they need an adult to be supervising it. So there might be some kind of a guardianship to help protect their rights.

Laws can and do change at any time. And specific circumstances can change, so always look to see what the current status is of something you want to use.

So there have been various things that happen in the news. A rapper pulled a song in a copyright fight. Omega copyright wind up. Copyright provision allows artists to regain control of music. So they actually fought some companies that were trying to use their music and won, which is a good thing.

There's plagiarism over trademarks. People were suing Google over copyright issues. In particular, when they were going to try to digitize all the books in the world and somebody said, excuse me, a lot of that is copyrighted. And enough people fought it and Google said, well, maybe we won't digitize all the books in the world.

If any of you remember when a lot of places wouldn't sing the happy birthday song because it was being claimed to be copyrighted. I think it was Warner Brothers. After a very long extended lawsuit, it was proven that not only was it not copyrighted but that they had been deliberately trying to obfuscate the case to fool people into thinking they owned a copyright. So if you want to sing Happy Birthday in a restaurant you're perfectly fine to do so now. It's been proven. It's public domain because it was published without a copyright symbol on it.

Two countries are arguing over a song copyright. Indonesia and Malaysia are arguing over who owns the rights to a song now. Now realistically, this song is supposed to go back a couple of centuries. Probably nobody owns a copyright, but countries fight over copyright. So like I said, on a practical level a lot of the stuff we do as genealogists, especially if it's mostly within our families, probably the copyright police are never going to show up. But if you want to put out a book, if you want to publish a website these are things you need to think about. Ways you can check for copyright. In the US, the Copyright Office is the ultimate authority. They have a lovely website with lots and lots of information to tell you about copyright, how to register something, how to search the records, how to get another drink of water.

I'm actually holding up much better than I thought I would. Searching is the best thing you can do because it's kept-- now that it's all on the computer and in a computerized database it's kept fairly up date. So you can search everything since 1978. Just type in a name. Type in the name trindle, and there's only-- what? About a dozen names.

You can put in the name of your family and see if any specific family member-- if you find a book you can put it in there.

Now, the flip side of everybody else's copyright is, yes, anything you create has a copyright and you have the right to protect that copyright, just like those companies have a right to protect it.

If you don't register your copyright with the Copyright Office it's still copyrighted, but you can only recover profits that were not made. So if you print publish a book and I copy 50 copies and hand them out to people, you can sue me for the cost of those 50 copies that you did not get. If you register it you can sue for damages. Costs of conducting your lawsuit and lost profits. How much did I lose by you distributing that then-- they shared it with other people and they shared it with other people and all those books I could have sold. So potential profits as opposed to actual countable ones. You can register it by simply going to the Copyright Office. You can send a copy to yourself. You can send copies to others. You can have a copy notarized. The best protection overall is registering it with the Copyright Office.

Remember I mentioned this earlier about a lot of the stuff in this period, what either wasn't copyrighted or was not renewed? A very important thing that came out recently-- of all things that was posted on YouTube.

A copyright mistake in Night of the Living Dead is what made zombies so popular.

I think it's like an eight minute video. It's worth watching. I've put the URL in there. So this is what you should have done. Scarlet Street. You have the name, the copyright word, when it was done-- in this case is what? XL '45? Yeah, 1945. And who owns the copyright? Universal Pictures. We have the four components, so that was copyrighted in '45. What do you not see on the title page of Night of the Living Dead? No copyright, no date, and no owner of the copyright. That little video on YouTube? They interviewed Romero about and he said, yeah. I messed up. So he did not own a copyright on it because he didn't put it on there. And this is why these companies all protect their copyrights because what could he have done to anybody who tried to copy it if he hadn't done that? How many people wouldn't have copied it if he had put the copyright on there? So anything you create comes under the same category. If you're creating something-- it's just not a bunch of family table lists. Like Kathy's book about her family that she wanted to have the painting on the cover. She's written a whole narrative about that. That's not just a bunch of facts put together. If you do something like that, do you want people copying and slapping it up on the web? Probably not. You have the right to have a copyright on your published materials just the same as the big companies do. And yes, email and photographs come under that. Now, this isn't one of those things where, again, most people don't really enforce it. But if you write an email you have a copyright in it. I'm not supposed to copy it and send it to somebody else without asking your permission. This is something we're all really lax about. Most of the time it is not important. But if there's important information in it, if it's something you really didn't want distributed, or if it's some idea that you had for a project and then somebody else steals-- well, somebody might actually sue about that. Family photographs, people copy and send and post on Facebook-- and yes, I do that too-- because we all know each other. We're friends. We're family members. We're not trying to do anything. What if I have a family member who is a professional photographer and he did some really beautifully staged photos and he's been selling them? Well, if I just slap that up on Facebook he might not be very happy with me. So the situation, the specific people, and the contacts have a huge effect on how people are going to react to the situation.

So obtaining permission. What do you need to do? You need find the copyright owner. If it's a book and you can't find the author's name or something, well, see what it says in the book. Who owns the copyright? It might be the publisher. It might be the author. If you can't really determine or if you're wondering what the current status is, contact the publisher. If it's a website, contact the webmaster. Hi, I found this material on your website. It doesn't have a name on it. It doesn't have a copyright notice on it. Who wrote this? Can I reuse this? And if it's a newsletter magazine editor or newsletter magazine write to the editor. I found this article. Then you can get what I did. Oh, we copied that from a website and didn't give them credit and forgot where we got it. Not a good answer.

Depending on what you're using your material for-- oh, OK. Yes, Kathy. Here, I'll go back to that slide. Yeah. So let's say we get approval, because I did. I found some pictures on the website of where my Great Aunt used to work and sent them a note. And I said, hey, I'd love to put this is a book about Reba. Blah, blah, blah. Is that OK with you? Somebody wrote back and said, sure, go ahead. Down on the page in my book I put the photograph and then courtesy of and the name of this-- the [? arttrack.com. ?] That's all I put. But is there something else? I don't have a name. I kept the confirmation. I kept it in case someone questions it, but is that it? OK, so she found some pictures on the web, asked that web site do I have permission to use these? The person said, yes, no problem. In her book she just put permission from-- the website or the company? Does she need to do any more than that? Not in the book. If you're publishing the book you don't have to give the entire history of your legal communications with somebody. However, the Copyright Office might ask for more clarification like they did with your mother's painting, or if somebody comes to you and asks do you want to keep that material. But you don't have to keep it all on the book. The public doesn't need to know that. It says, oh, she got permission from this. Yes, sometimes people make that up too. I've been using Google Maps and then using Street View to find homes where my ancestors lived. Can I use those images? Can you use photos that you get from Google Maps? Google actually gives very clear instructions on what to do for permission for copyright. Go to the Google Maps site. And I don't remember where it is now but-- because I actually did something with theirs once and went, oh, Google, where's the-- pretty much if you're not doing anything like publishing a book and making a million copies, they give you permission. But go to the Google Maps page, find the information. It's very clear what they want you to do. Do you have to go through each event, each encounter, or is it just a little-- Well, depending on what you're doing, the same circumstances are probably going to apply. With them, it's more a matter of, are you using it for personal use, are you publishing it. But generally speaking, they don't seem to want to charge anybody. Maybe they'd want to charge Microsoft. Ha, ha, ha. I would. Copyright Clearance Center is set up to help you figure out who owns copyright to something. In particular, this is really useful if you're making a lot of copies of something for distribution of, say, an article or something-- if you're teaching a class, if you're sharing an article that you found in some journal with a whole bunch of family members. And they're really clear on how you need to go about doing stuff. They have information on there about obtaining permission and copyright and fair use. Just because that's their whole thing, they want you to know what you should be doing. Stanford University has a really good site for copyright and fair use. Theirs is actually written very clearly, very easy to understand. Center for the Study of the Public Domain primarily is focused on what is in the public domain. They're free for you to use, and use all the information you can. Cornell University is another one with a really good site for public domain. The Association of Research Libraries, know your copyrights. So there are tons of resources out there that will help you find out what you should and shouldn't be doing. I'm actually not entirely sure if this is up there anymore because, well, we actually closed the California State Genealogical Alliance last year. But a lot of the pages stayed up because we wanted people to continue to learn about copyright. Another genealogy group-- National Genealogical Society, standards for sharing information with others. This is their specific recommendations, not necessarily the broad scope of what is public domain, but what they're suggesting in terms of genealogy you should follow. If anybody of you went to the talk by Judy Russell earlier in the conference where she talked about what you can and can't use with photographs-- because she does a lot of stuff on her blog about copyright. So you can go to her blog and just look at all the posts about copyright, and hers are really geared for genealogists. And earlier, as the question came about linking, as of right now links are still fine. Like I said, there are some people trying to argue that we shouldn't be able to do that. But the whole structure of the web is built around doing links. Yes, sir. [INAUDIBLE] Wait, say, that again. I had trouble. Well, I was the photographer that took a picture of a grave for BillionGraves or Find a Grave. I sent that to them to put it on the site. Did I give away the right to use that myself? No, OK. Question is, if I'm a photographer and I take a picture of a tombstone and post it to Find A Grave or BillionGraves, am I giving away my copyright? BillionGraves, I'm not as sure about, but I think they follow fairly closely what Find A Grave Does Find A Grave makes it very clear on their site-- unless you post there, you are free to use this photo, you still own the copyright. That's why that one tombstone I found that I wanted to illustrate the article that I was doing in a journal, I wrote to the person. And like I said, she told me I was the first person who had ever actually asked. But they make it very clear, it's your choice what you want to do with the copyright. So if you don't want everybody to use it, you put it up there. The negative side of the web, of course, is simply that people can copy almost anything. Because of that, that's why we have this perception, anything on the web must be free for me to use. In fact, the title for this talk-- I used to work for a small daycare where the two directors had published a book on their style of daycare. So they had a book published out there that they wanted people to buy. When I talked to one of them about actually obtaining permission to reprint an article, well, they wouldn't put it on the web if they didn't want to use it, would they? From a published author. But her stuff is separate of course.

Other places you can look for information. Nolo press actually has a couple of books about copyright with the proviso that the last time I talked to Nolo press they proudly told me that, oh, all of our authors edit their own books. Yes. I have a question. A lot of people were asking about Find a Grave stuff. I was looking up my mom, and there was a picture on her Find a Grave that I had never seen before. And it says photo added by this person. So I emailed and just asked her where she got the picture. And she said that she got it from my mother, the school yearbook. And so did I need to ask her permission to use that picture of my mother-- So the question is, she's on Find a Grave. And for her mother's memorial page, there's a photo she didn't recognize. She wrote to the person who added it who said that she got it from her mother's school yearbook. Does she need to ask the woman who added it for permission? No, because that woman doesn't have copyright in it. In fact, the yearbook-- Oh, I'm sorry. Because I had a problem with another lady because these pictures say, photo added by. It does not mean that they took the picture. They got it from someplace else. Yeah, you said she got it from the yearbook. Well, you certainly don't have to ask her. Now the yearbook, you'd need to look at the yearbook. What year was the yearbook published? What does it say for copyright? Whether she violated a copyright by posting it on Facebook is another issue. And in fact, Find a Grave says you're not supposed to post anything on there unless you own the copyright or have permission. So that person may have violated copyright by putting the photo up there. She certainly doesn't have a copyright in it, but did she tell you what year book was? Well, just her high school yearbook. You would need to go back to that yearbook, find out what year it was published, did it have a copyright listed. If it falls in that period where you had to renew it, did the publisher renew the copyright? If it didn't get renewed, based on your approximate age and when I'm guessing your mother would have been born, it probably is public domain. But if you wanted to reuse it and do everything the right way, you should check, which means finding out from her, where did you get the-- you need find a copy of the yearbook. You don't know which year. It was probably her senior year because most books only did seniors at that time. There's a lot of people who put pictures-- Yes, there are a lot of people. That doesn't mean they're following copyright law. So I can use those pictures. Do I need to ask their-- Wait, you can use those pictures, why? Use them for what? For my tree. This goes back to, is anybody going to catch you. Probably not. Sometimes, depending on what the copyright status of the photo is. No, it may not be legal. If you're totally keeping it to yourself, I'm not going to report you. But it all depends on, when was it taken, who took it, has it expired, is it public domain. If you're doing it only for yourself, you probably don't have to worry. You certainly don't have to ask her permission. You were next weren't, you, ma'am? Did you have your hand up? Yeah, you had your hand up. I have all these old boxes of photos that I've gotten, and I have no idea who took them or where they came from even. What's the status there? Do I assume that because they're just old photos that I can't even identify-- OK, everybody has a box of photos. They don't know who they are, and no one remembers. A lot of it, as far as the actual legal status, is going to depend on when they were taken. If they're taken before '23, no problem. If they're taken in the '23 to '77, probably realistically public domain at this point. If they're after '77, the copyright's probably held by somebody. On a practical basis, are you ever going to know who took them? Probably not. So are you going to get in trouble? Probably not. If you see something that looks like a studio photograph or has a studio name on it, see if the studio still exists. A lot of them are out of business, and this is kind of happened with a lot of the stuff that Google was trying to digitize with all the books. Orphan works-- yeah, technically the copyright is probably still in force. But nobody really knows who owns it. And Google was arguing, well, we'll just put them all up there. And then if somebody says they own it, we'll deal with it. And people really didn't like that. So they didn't do it. But that's kind of the situation we're dealing with these unnamed, unidentified photos. We just don't know. And like I said, on a practical basis, I don't think anybody's going to come and get you for it. I'm trying to remember how many-- let me see me how many more slides I have. We're close to the-- I can do another question. Who was next? Wait, somebody in the back-- no, no, in the back, back that we haven't heard from yet. So I was just wondering about obituaries. So if I find-- you know, you talked about that window of time after 1923 and before 1964, is what I think you said or something. So if the publisher of the image query is not reachable, if they went out of business or whatever, and I want to find out if they've renewed the copyright. You want to find out if they what? If they renewed the copyright or it expired. So I want to know if it's in the public domain. Is that something that's easy to find out about the-- So, basically, primarily he's asking about obituaries and who published it and especially if somebody has going out of business. A lot of that should be findable with the Copyright Office because that's where they would have registered a copyright. And like you said, if it's in that period between-- most newspapers didn't really do copyrights. So the odds are very high it would be public domain. But you would start with, who is the publisher, was it the LA Times, was it somebody else. And a lot of the bigger companies, you can usually find an online history. Smaller ones-- the area it was published in. If you call the public library or something, they can often tell you the history of, oh, yeah, that paper was published by this family and they owned it to this date, and they sold it to this one. A lot of that is actually traceable especially in newspapers because newspapers are very public forums. So people know about them, and historical societies and libraries often have a lot of information. Again, depending on what you're doing with it, are the copyright police going to come and get you? Unlikely. If it's something like the LA Times, like that society wanted me to do, you might want to check on permission because a lot of them did renew stuff. Instagram-- a family member puts their photograph on Instagram. With your phone, you can copy it and take a copy of the photo. What's the copyright regulation there? OK, Instagram. Well, Instagram is kind of like Facebook and Snap and a lot of-- whoever took the photo owns the copyright. So whoever took that photo and slapped it up on Instagram is the one who owns the copyright. Is the person going to enforce the copyright is a very different question. If it's family members and what people slap up all the time, no. Most of the time, nobody's ever going to enforce those. That doesn't mean they can't, and it doesn't mean that you might not get bitten by it. But in our very sharing culture with social media, for the most part, I think a lot of people have just accepted-- it's going to be passed around all over the place. But if somebody wanted to enforce it, the very real possibility exists that they could. Let me see what else we got here. I mentioned trademarks earlier, which are not the same as copyright. That's registered separately. One of the reasons people defend trademarks and defend copyrights and companies defend them is because you can lose control of them. Now, these are all trademark names that went generic-- aspirin actually used to be a trademark. Cellophane, dry ice-- these were trademark names by companies. After a certain time being used, they didn't defend it, and then somebody went to court and said, they haven't done anything. This isn't an enforceable trademark anymore courts agreed. Xerox is a company that has strenuously avoided that. And Xerox is still an enforceable copyright. If you are using proper terminology when you write something, you should say that you're photocopying because they do fight it every time they find it. Copyright is very similar. Kind of like the Snapchat photos, if you let your stuff be copied all over the place and don't try to get anybody to stop, you will often lose the ability to do so. Well, you let this one be copied and this won't be copied and this one be copied. How can this when suddenly you're making a fuss about. You've established a pattern. So when people get upset because the LA Times won't let them republish the article about their society, they have to or else they lose control over everything they're doing. And what do you know? See, I timed it right, Nikita. So we have a few more minutes for questions. I'll go you and then you, and then we'll see who's after that. So typically, I guess, I see sometimes the person that owns the copyright. Usually, you'll get a letter from their attorney that says cease and desist. And then that's the end of it as long as you cease and desist, unless it's somebody really famous, like songs and things like that. Does that [INAUDIBLE]? So she says in her experience what she's seen is that you'll often get a letter, a cease and desist letter from the lawyer of whoever owns the copyright and then nothing else. A lot of that depends on the person or company that owns the copyright and what kind of material it is. Some companies are well known for sending c and d letters and doing nothing to pursue them. If it's a lot more money involved, then you might want to be paying attention. It's definitely going to be an individual case. If you try and make sure you're doing things right in the first place, then you probably won't ever get one of those letters. Right, I mean, but if you do. I-- Well, if you do get one of those letters, look at what you did. You actually violate that person or that company's copyright? If you did violate the copyright deliberately or otherwise, how do you rectify it and what are they asking you to do in their C and D letter? Do they just say, don't publish it anymore. If you have a website, do they say take it down. I mean, I accidentally once on my blog put up somebody's copyrighted image that I hadn't realized because I got it from one of the actually well-known copyright free web sites. And how it got there, I don't know. But the guy emailed me and said, you're talking about copyright, and did you realize you have my image. I went, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And I quickly put up a copyright thing and apologized. So it depends very much on, what are they asking you to do, and are you in the wrong. If you're in the wrong, try to rectify it. You don't want to be known as somebody who goes around violating copyright. And then the other one-- yeah, you were the next one. Similar question-- do they have an obligation to notify you, or can they just immediately sue you? Do they have an obligation to notify me first before suing me? No, they don't. If they don't want to, they don't have to. They can totally spring it on you. This is why I don't like doing things-- like the LA Times. I don't want to take off a big company. On the left, yeah, you. Then you, but you first. So I just have a question about family trees themselves. I came across a blog or whatever, and it had the family tree. And at the bottom, it did actually say, "My work is copyrighted." Now, can a family tree be copyrighted? Can a family tree be copyrighted? The facts cannot be copyrighted. If you have particularly done some illustrative work and laid it out in a very different way from some of the accepted standards, essentially that's pictorial. You can copyright that. But the facts, the names the dates, no. Nobody. That's public domain stuff. [INAUDIBLE] Well, if it's facts that they're talking about and all they're doing is putting the facts down, again, facts cannot be copyrighted. But if you wrote a lovely paragraph talking about your great grandmother, and they copied your entire paragraph verbatim, yes, that's a violation of your copyright because that's not just the facts. That's your expression of the facts. And I think you are going to be the last question. Well, I'm an artist and photographer. And so I'm on the other end. People are always violating my copyright. And so I do pictures and cards and all this for family. And family and friends that I found out later that people liked that so much, they went and got it copied and gave it as gifts and all this without acknowledging me, without asking me. And so I would have to go over how it's reproduced-- Well, since it's your family members-- obviously that makes it a more delicate situation-- you're giving it to them and then they're-- you probably need to talk to them on a personal basis. My question is, I know they're violating my copyright, but how do I do it in a nice way without damaging the relationship? Because I don't want them to feel that I don't-- But that's what you do for a living. Yeah. How do I talk to them about it? How close are you to the family members who are doing this? Can you have that kind of personal conversation? I really appreciate that you like my artwork so much. You wanted to share it. But you did realize that's what I do for a living. And when you do that, I don't get to sell cards because you've been giving them away. So because you don't want to tick off the family members, you kind of make it an apologetic tone of voice. I really don't want to tick you off, but you're taking money out of my mouth. But no, I mean, and a lot of it's going to depend on your specific relationship with the family members who are doing this. Absolutely, though, you need to figure out a way to do it. Or if you find that there's a particular couple of them who keep doing it, stop giving them cards. Give them really plain ones without your beautiful artwork, which is a little harsher. But that's protecting what you do for a living. Well, I think they don't understand that they-- they think that that's something that they own. Well, look up some of the web pages I've cited here. And in particular, look for ones that give explanations about the difference between owning and the copyright. And use that material to explain it to them. So I gave you this, but I still own that copyright and I sell it to other people because this is what I do for a living. And like I said, if they just don't understand or don't want to understand, stop giving them cards with your artwork because that's the only way you're going to be able to protect yourself. But yeah, I agree, when it's family members, you have to be really delicate about it. That was the last question because Nikita is saying, time's up. But hey, I did pretty good. Well, thank you all for coming.