In a fairly desperate search for one branch of my family I recently purchased a whole pile of booklets of parish register transcriptions published by a Family History Society somewhere in an East Anglian county that isn't Norfolk
It would be nice to offer lookups from those, but on the one hand that would clearly breach copyright and on the other hand it would deprive that society of a modest income stream. I think if I saw someone requesting a lookup for one of the parishes that are covered, I would try to remember to point that person to where s/he can buy the transcripts and stifle the immediate feeling of being really happy that I can help someone. Anyway, having the whole parish register is often much more useful than just having details of the one baptism, marriage or burial.
I think I would feel slightly different if it were a digital copy of the original register or an out-of-copyright transcription. But only slightly. My understanding is that the publisher of the CD (or fiche, but they're usually CDs these days) has copyright in the format, but he surely can't have copyright in the content. Otherwise we could all go and scan in copies of out-of-copyright editions of Jane Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare etc and then claim that we owned the copyright on the texts. But there's the fair play argument too, which is important. Nobody is only ever going to go to the effort of producing PR or other transcripts in a digital medium if they're only ever going to sell one copy, and the buyer of that one copy then redistibutes the information contained in it. As genealogists - amateur or professional - we need to keep buying these transcripts in sufficient numbers that makes it worthwhile for the companies to produce them.
And I think that argument extends to the on-line databases managed by the likes of ancestry and findmypast. Like it or not, they're businesses, and they need to make a profit. Where would we be if these companies had never made available the censuses and other record sets? We might moan and get thoroughly irritated by the filthy lucre side of these businesses, but it's the filthy lucre that makes them exist at all.
Rootschat's view on the copyright of the Ancestry/FindMyPast etc census databases seems to me to be a good balance, and one that can apply to things other than censuses too: the transcript that forms the database you search is copyright; but if you transcribe it from the original image, then that transcription is your copyright and if you choose to make it available on rootschat, that's up to you. The images are copyright too (?TNA used under licence by Ancestry/FindMyPast/etc?), which is why we can only post small sections if asking for help reading what it says, or otherwise illustrating a point.
I read recently here on rootschat a comment that those who have paid for access to the various databases should be cautious about providing information from them for all and every look-up request. I don't think I've expressed that very well, but the original poster's meaning was that there are some people who use rootschat (and probably other fora) as a way of avoiding paying any subscriptions. While it's nice to help, I think that's right. Obviously, it's a completely different matter providing another set of eyes to help someone who's clearly looked themselves.
One thing I've not quite ever understood is how places like records office and TNA can seek to control publication of images (e.g. digital photos)
made by readers/visitors of documents that might be several hundred years old. The form you sign for permission to photograph documents in records offices has always in my experience included something about you not being able to use the images in a publication without permission. That can't be copyright as the documents must be out of copyright, so it must be something else. Maybe it's something do with reproducing something that belongs to someone else?
