INTRODUCTION

C'mon now!  'Fess up!  How old were you when you first heard the term "plagiarize"?  When was the first time one of your fellow classmates copied his term paper verbatim from a book and presented it as his own work?  Sadly, he could have avoided a failing grade, ridicule from his teacher and the other students, and maybe more severe punishment from the school district.  All he had to do was to use quotation marks and cite his source.  Or, he could have explained his topic in his own words, giving credit such as "Dr. So-and-so states..."  Why did he fail to follow this basic rule of writing and publishing?  Was it laziness, or did he know and dislike the original author?  Most unfortunately, in spite of sanctions, he may not have learned his lesson and may be doing the same thing today on the World Wide Web.

PLAGIARISM AND GENEALOGY

Plagiarism is the act of copying something from another source and giving yourSelf credit for writing or compiling it.  This concept is fairly simple when the stolen property is text taken from a book or paper.  Instructors can often identify plagiarized work simply because it is not the student's style of writing or because it sounds too professional.  Sometimes the source is familiar to the teacher--possibly material from a textbook used in class or from a supplemental reading assignment.  But electronic genealogy has its own rules, and anyone publishing a tree or gedcom or other genealogical compilation should first understand what they are.

All vital records--unless sealed by a judge--are in the public domain.  Note that the Federal Census is not available to researchers until 70 years have passed since it was compiled.  This standard is more of a courtesy to living people or even a hedge against the paranoia of intrusion on privacy, and it corresponds to the old 70-year copyright rule because technically all public records are just that:  public.    I worked for government for many years.  If someone knew where to look, they could find my salary in plain view whether I liked it or not.  What this means to us is that no one holds a "copyright" on public records and anyone can use them.  Citing a transcription of the Census or copying old records that have been copied before is not plagiarism and it's not against the law...

However, if you're going to transcribe or copy names and dates, you'd better present it in your own unique format if you plan to publish.  The information should be in a "tree" or gedcom, or a table, or in some format that you've devised yourSelf or you could be guilty of intellectual theft.  While the names and dates are in the public domain, the format of a Web or printed page is not.  The formatting belongs to the author or the Webmaster of the site.  I personally would not copy someone's page verbatim even if I gave full credit to the format to the source, but there are exceptions such as getting permission to scan or copy.  Even when information is taken from a very old book and the compiler has passed away, it is not good form to copy a format even though it may technically be legal.

If you like the way the data has been formatted by the original researcher, there is always the option of linking to it.  This brings up another debate.  When the Web was young, people typically stated that any site was public, and therefore they were free to link to it at any time.  This is not exactly true.  In general, sites which contain a lot of music, art, or videos would rather you NOT link to them since their pages already get high usage.  Also, there was a famous case in which someone linked to a sub-page, and the original webmaster was insistent that they link instead to the main page of the site with, perhaps, a note to see a certain sub-page once you get there.  This may happen because the webmaster wants you to see what the entire site is about.  There may be other items of interest there.  Or it may be that the copyright is only on the main page, and he wants secondary viewers to know where the credit lies.  In any case, it is always proper form to write to the webmaster or owner and ask permission before linking (no kidding!).  Some people may laugh;  others may present certain restrictions;  still others may never reply.  My advice is (a) laugh along with them, but know you did the honorable thing;  (b) link and follow all instructions;  and (c) forget the link--it's their loss, not yours.  Chances are you can find the same information elsewhere.

In some instances, a webmaster may tell you to go ahead and copy something verbatim.  This can be a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire page.  In a scholarly paper, the author would almost always footnote copied material, either at the bottom of the page or in a separate section at the end of the document.  At the very end of the paper would come the Bibliography.  This sounds repetitive, but you may use many sources when you gather information while only quoting or extensively paraphrasing material from a few of them.  Likewise, genealogy software usually has a field for notes which include sources.  But exceedingly long gedcoms, brief discussions, etc. on the Web are not quite as rigid, and a lot of communication is truly informal.  However, IF you are given permission to copy, you MUST make sure that you have all the information on hand--the URL of the main site as well as the URL of the sub-page, the name of the site/page, the name(s) of the author(s) or compiler(s), their own copyright date--these are the most important things to include.  Check everything out completely before you publish.  For instance, if a person uses a certain ISP as their host, the ISP does NOT own any rights to the material.  All a host can do is to take issue with the customer over any violations which may then lead to corrections being made.  If they are NOT made, the ISP can drop that customer from its client roster.  Similarly, if you are the webmaster, you can copyright your own formatting;  but credit for any external contributions must be given to the ones who contribute and their name(s) posted prominently on the page.

The Web is a confusing place.  It is never correct to "lift" a graphic or a piece of music from someone else's page, especially if that page has a copyright notice.  But some sites are designed to provide multimedia for public use, and some don't give you a clue as to whether they are owned by someone or not.  In those cases, appropriating the graphic or music file is up to your discretion.  However, if you are notified by the original owner to remove his property from your page, probably no harm will be done if you comply immediately.  The owner has every right to stop you from copying his creative work, but he doesn't have the authority to stop you from, say, using a graphic that has similar subject matter but is obviously different from his in many ways.

FROM MY EXPERIENCE

I have no idea how many times people have copied and reprinted the initial paragraph on our "Self Portraits" page:  "Brief History of the Self Family in the United States."  I do know that I've seen it featured on quite a few initial pages of Self-based pages published on the major Web Hosting sites.  So far I've turned a blind eye to this theft so as not to alienate cousins over a few lines of text.  But the point is this:  I didn't take this paragraph from a book or from some other site.  True, the facts are well-known ones recounted by many researchers.  Yet I wrote it mySelf.  I truly don't mind having it appear in other places BUT I do expect to see it in quotes if it is copied verbatim, and I do expect to see credit given to Tim, to me, and to "Self Portraits."  It makes me very sad that some people can't take the time to do this.  These words are not footnotes or something copied from a personal letter to the researcher.  They are MY words, so please give me credit if you use them...

In another incident, a USGenWeb volunteer decided to give up her position and allow her site to be adopted by someone else.  We asked to take it, and she agreed.  All of the pages and their contents were given to us with the exception of one listing of names and dates.  This data was vital to visitors.  We truly hated removing it, and we knew from a similar experience that not only would it be missed, but we would be besieged by demands from researchers that it be restored.  Time was too valuable to waste explaining the problem to so many individuals.  We knew that the data was in the public domain.  The formatting--whether done by the webmaster or someone else--was NOT.  So we decided to use our own formatting to present the material...

You can probably check the List Archives and find that her response is still there--a very angry one at that, accusing us of "stealing" her work and acting as if she was still the County Coordinator.  So here's what we did:  we paid our cousin who lives in the area to find the original records at the courthouse and copy them.  We then proceeded to create a presentation backed by these copies in case anyone questioned the source of our material.  Next we asked a professional librarian to do a search to find out if this woman had done the same, or if she had taken the material and its format from another source.  It turned out that she herSelf had copied verbatim the data and its format presented in an article by someone else without giving him credit for it.  This was the root of her anger--she didn't want anyone to know that she had plagiarized, the crime she had publicly declared us guilty of committing.  The same librarian located the original transcriber and his address, and we wrote to him, explaining the situation.  He acknowledged that we had done our own work the second time around, but he also said we were welcome to compare the two sets of data and use anything we wanted to use from his pages which had been published in a genealogical magazine many years ago.  We stuck with our own format, but we also gave credit to him, his publisher, and our cousin who are all responsible for bringing information to our visitors...

This example illustrates one more thing we need to remember when publishing on the Web:  once you give something away, you have no more control over it.  In everyday life, if you sell an item or give a gift to someone--whether it's a bag of jelly beans or your old car--you no longer own it.  When you sell the object, you're wise to sign a sales agreement and ask the buyer to do the same, making copies for both of you to keep in case of a dispute.  This action is legally and morally correct.  Giving something away doesn't require a legal document since no money is involved, but it doesn't make it any less morally wrong to then insinuate yourSelf and your opinions into its use, reformat, or update.  It is no longer yours.  Period.  In addition, in the USGenWeb and many other places, you can give away an entire site or choose only certain pages, perhaps keeping some things for a future page of your own.  You can also retain ownership of the entire site without the organization's name so that the new owner must start from scratch.  We've done both, and as long as it's clear from the beginning, there's no reason to argue.  To give up an entire site and THEN take parts of it back is very poor Web behavior.

We have had much more stolen from us than a small paragraph at the top of the page.  We have had entire pages copied verbatim and posted somewhere else--where doesn't matter, your personal site or as part of a query in a surname forum--you still need to get permission to use original wording or formatting and give proper credit when permission is received.  No one is asking you to cite a source for every single individual in your tree;  and no one expects you to cite a list of names and dates which you have put into your own format since they are almost certainly public records which you would have discovered eventually.  But to highlight and copy an entire page and its format is a violation of copyright.  And make sure, if you get permission to do so, that you list the name of the site and its owners or webmasters, not solely the name of an organization.  Simply because RootsWeb is our host for certain pages does not mean that those pages belong to RootsWeb.  Our names belong in your citation.

SUMMARY

You can copy as many vital records as you wish.  All births, marriages, and deaths are in the public domain.  But if you copy a format, a sentence or story, or an entire Web page in its original formatting, you are committing plagiarism.  Plagiarism is definitely against the rules in academia.  You can receive a failing grade on an otherwise good piece of work or even be expelled from school.  Plagiarism on the Web has the same consequences as copying verbatim from a printed book.  Do let others know if you have taken a passage from someone else's creative work and, if possible, put it in quotation marks with a citation.  It is never right to steal, and thieves will eventually be found out.