Privacy on the Internet

The Right To Privacy

Published in Ancestry January/February 2000, Vol. 18/No. 1 is an article entitled Mistake or Misdemeanor, Staying Legal with Internet Copyrights, by Rhonda R. McClure. If you have a webpage you need to read this!

From the Library of Congress Web Site:

"A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the author's life plus an additional 70 years after the author's death. In the case of 'a joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for him,' the term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving author's death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author's identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter." U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright Basics (Circular 1)

For your information - ANCESTRY publication (Volume 16 No. 1, January/February 1998) entitled "Copyrights, Plagiarism, and Ethics: Rights to Use Information," by Donn Devine, CG, CGI, "the law of privacy is one that every family historian needs to understand and exercise caution. It protects living people from having details of their private lives made public unless they have done something to place themselves in the public eye. The kinds of information protected include the very things we're interested in for family history: age, residence, occupation, relationships, and associations.

Living people who are not already public figures have a right to keep personal information about themselves private, and they can collect legal damages, just as for a physical injury, if anyone violates that right. Other privacy laws of recent origin prohibit keepers of certain records, most of them governmental, from releasing personal information. These laws are directed at the record-keepers, and provide penalties if they are violated, but usually don't affect use of the same information obtained from other sources. Records that are coming under such privacy restrictions include birth, marriage, and death registrations for some years after the event, and records relating to adoption, schooling, employment, criminal activity, and health."

Please take care in distributing private information about your cousins and protect them from unethical use of this information.