Genealogy Path

Those of you that have been reading Genealogy Path for a while know my feelings about online entities helping themselves to others hard work and volunteer services and manipulating it to make money off of it. I feel that this is purely profiteering and believe that those participating in it should pay some dire consequences. But in today’s social climate, if there isn’t an explicit law and you control the Terms & Conditions of a service completely, you can do pretty much what you want to.

Many remember the a few years ago the hub-bub over the fact that Ancestry.com usurped the family data that people uploaded to their different sites in order to share their research with others FOR FREE? Well, Ancestry.com had other ideas. They took that data and started charging people to access that data. Ancestry.com didn’t PAY for the information nor did they PAY for the time and effort that people spent working on it. The people did it for the love of genealogy and of being able to share the data with as many people as possible. Ancestry.com makes a profit from that data. Ancestry.com said that the Terms & Conditions (T&C’s) allowed them to do so and that everyone who uploaded data up agreed to those T&C’s. But they control the T&C’s and just because they say they can do it doesn’t make it ethical. But I guess if you have the power and the money, ethics is whatever you say it is. And Ancestry.com is the same company who took my money through their manipulation of these same T&C’s and the ONLY way I could get my money back was to file a fraud complaint with the State of Utah. But enough of that…water under the bridge…yada, yada, yada.

Have you ever created a genealogical webring and then decided to delete it? Did you do it on Webring.com? Well, guess what? Webring is auctioning those sites off! Yep, they’re going to make whatever money they can from other people’s efforts and time. Even though people may have deserted these webrings, not all of them put them up for adoption/auction. Many just tried to delete them. But, nope…Webring.com wouldn’t have any of that. Can’t make any money that way. I had previously written about this situation at Webring.com on my other blog.

I checked out to see what they were auctioning off and I saw a few webrings that were specific to certain surnames. Why would anyone who has any ties to that surname want to pay ANYTHING to Webring.com for that webring? They have more of a right to that webring then Webring.com does. Again, this is another desperate measure by someone who made a stupid move to buy something that didn’t cost the seller anything (Webring came with GeoCities when Yahoo bought GeoCities) and the seller (Yahoo) found someone stupid enough to put up good money for it. IMHO, that person is just taking over other people’s efforts in order to make a profit. Challenge them and they will tell you that the T&C’s (which THEY control) allows them to do so because it states that if you create a webring through their service, they own it. You are NOT the ring owner, but the ring manager. This denotes that you work for them…albeit without compensation. Don’t you just love the legal system? Ethics means nothings to these pople. If there is no law against it, they feel they have a right to do it.

So, thank God there are laws against trespassing otherwise they would feel they have a right to walk into your home and do whatever they wanted.

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