Genealogy Chat

Hi I am gradually working on a website for my family tree, and have thought about using census images for the relevant individuals. If I do this, will I be breaking any copyright regulations? Pauline

I never thought about that I have them on my website Zoe

Ancestry's terms and conditions: www.ancestry.co.uk/legal/Terms.aspx From what I can make out, as long as what you download is for your private research its OK. nell

Karen No, I think you will find that censuses are actually the property of the government. By extension the people own it, but we do not have copyright over it. nell

Thanks for your thoughts on that. Just wanted to see what others thought before displaying images Pauline

Cant see its a problem otherwise ancestry wouldnt allow the copy and share facility on there.

go to a proper family history site to find the answers to this, this site breaks every rule, just look at the people doing look ups , there results are always including 'View Record', which shows the results have been copyed and pasted from Ancestry, which is totally illegal, any other website would remove this straight away, when i do look ups for people i always transcribe it as on the census, i.e head, wife son etc, but to see it just in any order starting with view record to me looks so naff and illegal, one day this site will catch up or be closed, seen some people in the sun today find £5000 each for illegaly downloading music, there excuse, they did not know, well copying results straight from websites is just as illegal, hope some of you don't get the knock one day, try puting a census look up on roots chat copied from a website and see how long it stays. Ancestrys copy and share is for a limited number of images, a lost leader to get you take out a subscription

Thats quite right Gary, and I have to say I am always stunned by ancestry not clamping down on here. I do think they are a terribly tolerant and generous organisation. Though it is probably the case that once someone has a taster from another persons look ups, then the majority join ancestry themselves. Certainly the case with me and many others. But this question related to someone keeping the images for their own family tree.

I'd imagine that the definitive response could be provided by the National Archives. But the census images are most certainly crown copyright, and I feel sure that you'd need permission to post a copy to your website. Ancestry will be providing copies under licence from the National Archives, and that licence would give Ancestry specific authority to provide the 'Share' facility to its customers that allows them to give others access to the images. I broadly agree with Gary about people just copying and pasting transcriptions from commercial websites, and only ever give people my own transcriptions. Aside from anything else, I think that they're more accurate!

I should add that crown copyright is not perpetual. However, I don't know how the copyright period would be calculated for census images. One for the lawyers!

If posted on a public site you should probably put a line about the image being Crown Copyright. Ancestry do not seem to worry about people doing lookups and copying information unlike most vendors of censuses on CD-ROM who actively make it difficult to make a copy even for your own use. I listed strays (from Ancestry censuses) for my old home town on the ROOTSWEB message board for that town. ROOTSWEB and Ancestry are part of the same organisation of course. I suspect that there would be no problem in using images of the census page for a few members of your family but they would probably get very upset if you copies all the images for an area or perhaps even one surname. You could always ask the National Archives, there is probably some standard working that should be used. MB

Click on 'HELP' on any Ancestry page then put 'COPYRIGHT' into the search field. It will take you to an article on copyright of genealogical material though it probably refers to US law. MB

Gary, your choice of words makes it sounds as it you will actually be dancing in the streets when people on this site get fined for copying from Ancestry! I think you will find I never include the words View Record on any of my posts. There, I feel better now. Sorry everyone! Merry

Merry, me too! Re Crown Copyright The National Archives has a page about this here www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/legal/copyright.htm which starts by saying 'The Crown copyright protected material (other than the Royal Arms and departmental or agency logos) may be reproduced free of charge in any format or medium provided it is reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context. The exception to this rule is for material downloaded from our DocumentsOnline service (see below). Where any of the Crown copyright items on this site are being republished or copied to others, the source of the material must be identified and the copyright status acknowledged.' nell

I get the feeling that Ancestry think of lookups on their site as free advertising. Many people see how useful it can be and then go on to subscribe. Others would never have subscribed anyway so they have not lost anything. MB